Why environmentally friendly water?
We chose bottled water because it seemed like an obvious route into eco-sustainable business. It’s a fast-moving consumer product and
a way of engaging consumers
in environmental issues.
We’re producing the first CO2 neutral bottled water and we’re committed to investing our profits in water projects around the world. We’ve been working with charities such as WaterAid and Oxfam in Bangladesh, India, Madagascar and Mali to provide wells and clean drinking water for communities.
Was it difficult setting
up the business?
We looked at funding options. We approached venture capitalists, but we were suggesting putting the profits back into sustainable areas such as water projects and the venture capitalists were interested in getting high returns from their high-risk investment.
We went to the banks, but we didn’t have any security and – contrary to what you might have supposed after all that’s happened elsewhere – they were very risk-averse. We tried foundations, because we were suggesting ways in which to solve environmental problems, but they felt they could only give us money if we were a charity, but we couldn’t get charitable status even as a green business that was operating a not-for-profit model. In the end, we went out begging to individuals with high net worth to get involved as seed-funders.
Since then we’ve done 33 rounds of funding. The idea of being non-profit may have been taking it too far – perhaps it’s not an idea for this generation.
How did you decide on what went into the product?
We looked for a UK source of premium quality for our water and we went round just about every producer to find it. We didn’t want to use traditional plastic bottles, so our initial intention was to use glass.
Glass is easily recycled and has an organised recycling stream, but the market for water in plastic bottles is 10 times that for that in glass. We looked for an alternative to traditional plastic, and in 2006 we found a company making plastic from bio-polymer (polymers produced by living organisms), in this case from corn-sugar but it’s something that can be made from agricultural waste.
It looks a lot like plastic, though the first time we made it, it turned out yellow. We figured we couldn’t sell water in yellow bottles so we found a mineral that fixed that problem for us.
What happens to those bottles?
We needed a bottle that was fairly robust, but didn’t stay around for too long. We wanted to get back to nature in our approach, so developed a method by which we could compost our used bottles.
At over 50°C the polymer breaks down; microbes begin to eat it. An even better solution is something called anerobic digestion – which, basically, relies on a different kind of microbe. As it breaks something down it creates, not CO2, but methane – which can be used as a fuel. It’s a virtuous circle; when you grow a crop you’re pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, if eventually it becomes methane and is burned it returns to being CO2. Compare that to what happens with petroleum-based plastics.
If you incinerate those you are taking ancient carbon and putting it into the atmosphere. That has to be the worst possible solution.
Are other firms picking up on this?
The technology is all there.
If we as a tiny company can do this then, guess what? All the other companies can do it as well. We’ve heard recently that Coca-Cola is creating a new bottle that is 30 per cent bio-polymer.
There’s also a suggestion that in the not too distant future they’re going to produce one that’s 100 per cent bio-polymer.
Find out more
www.belu.org
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