In May 2018, James Longcroft made headlines when he launched his company Choose Water. Experimenting with materials on his kitchen table, science graduate James developed the world’s first water bottle that totally biodegraded within a matter of hours.
Created from a combination of non-toxic, sustainable and natural materials, Choose Water was a completely carbon neutral paper bottle with a waterproof liner and steel cap.
Having crowd-funded over £50,000, James was ready to launch the first bottles to market earlier this year. But plastics water bottles are only the start of James’ vision to change the world. He now wants to make his bottle the alternative for all PET plastics in the household.
As part of this wider vision, James is re-branding his firm, which employs six people and is based in Edinburgh, to simply Choose after realising his technology had the potential to go beyond bottled water.
James’s initial dream has been re-packaged, with the London-born entrepreneur now creating containers to replace any Polyethylene terephthalate – or PET – bottle. The PET bottle replacement was created with just a small tweak of his original technology.
While the water vessels began to biodegrade within hours, the new bottles take about 24 hours of constant exposure to water to breakdown.
This means they can be used for products that are used around water, such as washing up liquid, shampoo and conditioner.
Figures suggest about 20,000 new PET bottles are produced every second or 1.2million bottles every minute. The UK alone throws away 263million bottles of washing up liquid each year.
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The Choose washing up liquid bottles are available now, and can be bought directly from the Choose website with shampoo and conditioner available in the new year. Choose is already in talks with major cosmetics brands about future partnerships. So, watch this space.
James said: “While we were developing our biodegradable water bottle, we realised that it worked for so much more than just water. To have the biggest impact on reducing plastic pollution, we want to be able to replace all plastic bottles with our biodegradable alternative.
“Therefore, we are changing direction slightly, CHOOSE has become a packaging development company rather than just a water company. We will launch a range of products in our technology under our own brand and we will work closely with industry leaders across industries to replace as many PET bottles as possible.
“We are really happy to announce that our bottle is ready and we are launching a completely biodegradable washing up liquid to replace the 260million plastic bottles the UK goes through each year.
“As we enter 2020, we are going to launch more non-consumable products as well as bring our water bottle to market as well. It is going to be an exciting year at Choose and with the public’s support we hope we can help people reduce their plastic footprint.”
James and his team are still developing the bottled water, and are working on a scheme to scale up the project so they can truly accomplish their original mission – to rid the world of plastic bottles for good.
