Green message in milk bottle

Photo / Thinkstock

LONDON - A British inventor believes he's found the answer to the nation's developing landfill crisis.

Each day Britons use about 15 million plastic milk bottles, and as the average bottle takes 500 years to decompose, the waste mountains will have an impact on generations to come.

But Suffolk man Martin Myerscough used his son's efforts making a papier-mache balloon for school to design the GreenBottle, a sturdy paper shell with a plastic liner to keep the milk fresh.

The GreenBottle looks remarkably like conventional two-litre plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, and costs the same, but once the lining is ripped out the paper shell can be flattened and recycled up to seven times - plastic bottles can be recycled only once.

Alternatively, the paper bottle breaks down into compost in weeks. It has been trialled at Asda supermarkets in eastern England, and a national roll-out across the firm's chain starts this week.

Myerscough got the idea talking to the man who runs the local landfill.

"I asked him what was the main problem and he said plastic bottles, especially milk bottles, and that set me thinking."

Recalling his son's papier-mache balloon, Myerscough played around with several designs before coming up with a prototype. He claims customers have been "overwhelmingly positive" and plans to make the bottles entirely from paper and use them for other products such as detergent and shampoo.

Myerscough says GreenBottle production has a low carbon footprint, even if the paper cases do come from Turkey.

There are already greener alternatives to plastic bottles, such as pouches, but he says some supermarkets have withdrawn them because customers found them unwieldly. "The way the consumer uses the GreenBottle is identical to a plastic bottle."

- OBSERVER