The company has also found it hard to source acceptable recycled plastic and only found one firm that could supply the right material it needs for the new bottles.

The Norway way

All of this shows up a bit of a problem with our plastics recycling. In theory, a clear polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottle could go round and round the recycling system pretty successfully, as happens in Norway. But in Norway there is a deposit-and-return scheme in place which controls the type of bottle right down to the glue used on the label. The end result is a 97% recycling rate and a very pure source of plastics.

Here, of course, we use kerbside recycling and that produces a complex mix of plastics that makes it much harder to extract the right material for a company like Wenlock Spring and their new bottles.

Although this switch to recycled plastic bottles will cost a company like Wenlock Spring in the short term, it hopes it will encourage others to follow its lead and increase demand for recycled plastic as a material. As demand increases, that should start to push costs down and perhaps even lead to us looking again at how we collect and recycle plastic in this country.