What’s your big green(bottle) idea?

I was reading the rather brilliant ‘i’ newspaper on my iPad this morning (and in the long run, saving a few trees in the process, I hope!) and I came across an article about this clever little thing. It’s an alternative to the regular plastic milk bottle. In an ideal world, I guess we could all go back to using glass milk bottles, but they’re heavy, prone to breaking, and perhaps a little a little impractical, so this seems like a great alternative to solving a problem like the five million tonnes of plastic the UK uses each year.

Now, I’ve already linked you to GreenBottle’s website twice now, so I wont spend the rest of this post boring you with the details of how it all works. Suffice to say the outer shell of bottle is made from cardboard (which can be recycled up to seven times or decomposed in a matter of weeks) and the inner shell is a thin plastic bag (it uses less energy to make than the regular plastic bottle and takes up much less space on a landfill site). Clever, right?

So the story of the GreenBottle goes that the inventor, one Martin Myerscough, came with the idea after his son came home with a papier-mâiché balloon from nursery. The balloon inspired Martin to look at how paper could be formed in to different shapes and used for other purposes. He already knew about the amount of plastic bottles that end up in landfill each year (enough to fill the Albert Hall 50 times over, according to him), and wanted to do something about it. He spent 18 months developing his GreenBottle and managed to get a lovely supermarket to let him trial it. That was in 2007, and this Friday, the GreenBottle will be launched nationally.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog post isn’t to tell you all about the GreenBottle (as you can see from above, there are plenty of websites that do that for me), it’s to make a point about getting inspired and doing something about the green issues we all face. Martin Myerscough didn’t like the idea of plastic bottles filling up our planet year on year, so he set about making an alternative, and an alternative he did make.

But Martin isn’t the only one in the world to have a big green idea, think about Ruth Andrade from Lush who’s green ideas have helped change a cosmetics giant, they’ve reduced the amount of plastic they use by making their products naked, or using closed-loop recycling, and those green ideas helped Lush’s founders, Mark and Mo, to get OBEs for their services to the cosmetics industry. Anyway, who says green ideas have to be big? I turned my old honey jars into candle holders, and was pleasantly surprised when I walked into a bar last night to see the same idea being used to turn them into light fixtures by hanging them from the ceiling. I’m constantly trying to think of new ways to use old things, and as corny as it may sound, it is actually quite fun trying to find new ways to live a slightly greener life.

From something as small as giving something you’d usually throw away a new use, to changing the way people buy and store their milk. Everyone has an entrepreneurial streak, but what’s yours? Here’s an idea I’ll share with you; everyone’s worried about the amount of plastic carrier bags we use, so what if every supermarket collected customers’ old plastic bags and put them in boxes at the end of the tills? That way we could all use recycled carrier bags instead of having to ask for news ones? Maybe that’s already been done, maybe it’ll never work, but the only way a green idea becomes a reality is by getting it out there and getting people talking.

Now it’s down to you, what’s your big (or small) green idea? Perhaps there’s a product you’d love to make greener? Have you seen anything like the GreenBottle you want to share? Let me know in the comments below, tweet me @treehuggertweet, or write on thetreehuggger.co.uk’s Facebook wall.