2013. Recycling the unrecyclable

Published on May 3, 2013

Back in March 2013 Anchor launched their innovative triple layer Lightproof milk bottle designed to deliver Kiwis the best tasting milk in the world by locking in the taste and goodness nature intended.

Anchor's innovation team identified that light ages milk, breaking down its fresh taste and natural goodness. Milk is protected from light from farm to factory, but once it hits the bottle, exposure to light is inevitable.

So they developed a bottle to keep your milk in the dark and tasting its very best.

But as Tay Tay says, ‘haters going to hate hate hate” and cries of “I don’t know how much milk I have left” (we cant help people who cant work out if there is milk left or not by picking it up) and “it’s not recyclable because it’s made up of different colours”

Well that last one seemed like a problem that we could develop a solution for.

The Lightproof bottle is made up of clear, black and then white HDPE. We blow mould HDPE bottles ourselves (albeit little ones). So what happens if you us these Lightproof bottles to make new bottles?

So off to the local café in Penrose to get our hands on a decent quantity of empty Lightproof bottles (yes it did take some explaining as to why we wanted these). Washed and dried, we then ground these done to chips that we could run through our blow moulders and out came the sort of battleship grey bottle that we then gave to our designer and said you can do anything you want to come up with a brand around this. anything but change the colour of the bottle.

The result was Ecologic, a brand that was packaged in a bottle made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. The bottles are made from 100% recycled Anchor Light Proof™ milk bottles, in fact we made make 6 eco.logic bottles from a single 2 litre Anchor Light Proof™ milk bottle.

Now that’s eco-logical!