This Choose Water Bottle is 100% Biodegradable

Plastic is a good thing. No, in fact, it is a really good thing, as someone said to me recently, the real problem with plastic is that it’s too good. It keeps on doing the thing we wanted it to do long after we need it to stop. The ones that can not be trusted, it turns out are us. The Humans.

For those of you who have been stuck on a desert island with Bear Grylls or suffering from total amnesia for the last decade, there is an unavoidable and imminent disaster going on in our oceans. The ‘fall-out’ from our (humans’) inability to dispose of our plastic waste in a responsible manner has led to a situation we all need to start caring about and very soon.

Right now, in the all of the oceans in the world, there are huge amounts of plastic debris caught in the natural currents that circulate the globe and keep the world ticking. The largest of these is located between California and Hawaii and has been dubbed the ‘Pacific Trash Vortex’. The exact size and area of the plastic island is difficult to ascertain via satellite as the majority of the debris exists just below the surface, however, experts have estimated that it could be around seven hundred thousand square kilometres. To put that in context, we are looking at an area twice the size of Germany. This just the biggest, all oceans have one as the plastic culminates in the areas of lowest movement.

Marine wildlife events such as whales, turtles and fish being found dead and washed up with stomachs full of plastic have been on the sharp increase in recent years. This year has seen an all-time high in these incidents. Houston, we have a problem and it is not going away no matter how much recycling we do.

You may be thinking yaada yaada, I’ve heard all this before but what I am about to tell you is that I have just had a conversation with a man who can make an actual change. That’s right, none of this half-arsed reusable bottled stuff that, while a good idea, still entrusts us, humans to think about what we are doing. Our track record is not a good one, it turns out that we can not be trusted with this, the simplest of tasks. Not buying plastic bottles and not throwing them in the ocean.

James Longcroft used to sell plastic bottled water for a living, his aim was to donate 100% of his profits to an awesome charity called Water for Africa. About a year ago, James was at a promotional show for selling his water when someone approached him and told him about the plastic in the ocean, the recycling, landfill issues and all those things that are now all over every social media channel. Realizing that he was contributing to that problem while only trying to help people in Africa he decided to immediately stop what he was doing, cancel the rest of his operation which made up 75% of his business and dive headlong into creating the world’s first fully biodegradable water bottle.

So now, here we are a year on and James has his first working prototypes. A water bottle that will hold h2o and will biodegrade in the sea 100% within 2 weeks. I know, right!

So let’s get into the hows, the whats and whens. The ch2oose water bottles are made on the outside from recycled paper, on the inside, James had to find some kind of waterproof liner that was not born of petrochemical or non-biodegradable materials. He went back to basics and thought of nature and how that could help solve our problem. He thought of skin and how that is waterproof, but who wants to drink from old skin? Yuck! He moved onto plants and realised that there must be a solution there. Over the next year, James would try and test over 45 plant-based materials in experiments that started on the family home’s dining room table and through perseverance and hard work has ended up with a usable product. A water bottle that works and 100% biodegrades in the ocean.

Plastic in the oceans is a huge problem to us all and many types of marine life to which we humans on some level depend. There are a plethora of ways we can help from beach cleans to reusable bottles. The trouble is that they are all about trying to limit the damage of something that is inevitable. They are too little to turn the tide. As I keep saying humans (on the whole) cannot be trusted. We can all, I think, agree that only way to stop the problem is to tackle it at the source, at an industry level.

Ch2oose water and the bottle that they have developed needs to start going into production and start scaling up their operation. They need to be able to replace all the supermarket, vending machine and petrol stations (gas stations) plastic bottles with this new biodegradable wonder solution. The enormity of the task is overwhelming, all you have to do next time you go shopping is count the containers you buy and see how many of them are plastic. A lot. That’s is the end goal for James and Ch2oose. Total plastic defeat.

Can it be done? One of the questions I asked James was about the scope of the venture. Could the ch2oose bottles be used for fizzy drinks, household products, engine oil and other things that almost certainly will be sold to you in a plastic container? The answer is yes, they have to test every substance separately and address each issue on a case by case basis, but the good news is that James has already begun and the more time that elapses, the more products he can contain in the ch2oose bottle.

Why am I writing this? It might come as no surprise that to facilitate the demand and in order to scale up their operation to make a difference, he will need some help. I dislike the bit where I say “That’s where you come in” but I can’t think of anything better so, “That's where you come in”.

Ch2oose and James are running an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has already begun. The target is £25k to kick things off, let’s hope that they get one hundred times that because the more cash they get, the quicker things will change and for the better.

Editors note: As we at Surf Bunker are so invested in this venture we have decided to donate a whole month’s profits to the cause. What can we say you give what you can. Good luck to James and we hope he uses the £2.53 wisely.