The Anonymous Widower

What Is It About Suffolk?

There is an item on BBC Breakfast this morning about GreenBottle, which is a new concept of milk bottle, that uses a papier mache outer container and a small amount of plastic to actually hold the milk. When you have finished the milk, you split the container, with the outer biodegradable shell going into the cardboard recycling and the inner container into the normsl household waste. Read the full story here.

If I look at what makes a good idea, it ticks a lot of boxes.

1. It doesn’t expect the customer to make serious changes to their thinking.
2. It would appear that it doesn’t mean there are large changes to manufacturing and distribution.
3. Asda have not objected to stocking milk in these bottles. I’m always cynical about supermarkets. Their problem is they try to live up to a macho image.
4. Customers like it.
5. It is kind to landfill, even if the end user doesn’t recycle it.

But my initial question was, why has this been invented in Suffolk?

I do sometimes wonder, if it’s because Suffolk has always lived on the scraps government chooses to doll out to it and people in Suffolk get used to thinking about how to get round the problems that blight their lives.

As an example, railways in Suffolk have never received the investment they need.  I was brought up partly in Felixstowe and it was a miserable place for a teenager, as to get to Ipswich was either a decrepit train, an occasional bus or a bike. In some ways, I wonder if that was all good training for my life now.  You learned to plan journeys efficiently, until you could scrape enough together for a car.

Suffolk too is a very independent county and Suffolk people and businesses support each other.  GreenBottle have partnered with the independent Marybelle Dairy to prove the concept of the bottle.

In other ways, it might not be what Suffolk has but what it doesn’t.  Until the last couple of years, there was no university in Suffolk.

Does all of this push people to think for themselves?  And dare I say it out of the bottle.

February 1, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | Food, News | Environment, Suffolk