The plant-based water bottle.
We’re talking about protecting the environment, in particular protecting it from plastic waste. Incidentally, there’s a detailed analysis of the impact of plastic pollution, including the number of decades or centuries it takes for common plastic products to degrade, on the Happiness Without website. There’s a link below.
Today I’m talking to Jake and Amee, creators of the S’wheat reusable plant-based water bottle. Very special thanks to them for going through it all twice, because first time I forgot to turn the recorder on.
Anthony: Well, I'm talking today to Jake and Amee, the founders of the S’wheat sustainable water bottle. And my first question to them is, well, who needs another water bottle?
Amee: Yeah, it's a great question and something we definitely asked ourselves, so, you know, we came up with the idea for S’wheat when we seen from our own point of view that there was not really a reusable bottle on the market that fit all of our needs and we found that with consumers as well through market research.
Jake: Yeah, currently there's only plastic, steel and glass water bottles on the market, and we all know the health and environmental impacts that plastic bottles have, and that kind of leaves you with steel and glass and steel has a really high energy intensive manufacturing process. Our bottles are actually one sixteenth of the amount of energy to create compared to a typical steel bottle, and a lot of common issues you have with steel is that it starts to smell and you get, like, a metallic taste from the water.
Amee: Yeah, and the same with plastic, you get black mould around the bottom.
Jake: And that really leaves you with glass, which is a great option, but it's just very weak and it's not great durability wise.
Amee: Yeah, and a lot of our consumers, our customers are parents and they don't feel comfortable to give a glass bottle to their children. Also, a lot of our customers are into sports or go to the gym and again, don't want to carry around a glass bottle in case they drop it, so we were really looking for another alternative there that was sustainable and...
Jake: Sustainable and durable.
Amee: Circular economy is really important in what we do at S’wheat and so we wanted to incorporate that into the design as well.
Anthony: So you came up with a new product and you started a new business.
Jake: Yeah, so when we started S’wheat, circular economy was always at the front of our mind and we didn't want to make a reusable bottle out of really energy intensive materials or using an energy intensive manufacturing process, so we only use waste by-products, so we use wheat stalks, which is a huge by-product in the UK, a lot of it's fed to horses, and apart from that, it's left to biodegrade, so we only use wheat stalk and then bamboo as well just because we want to keep circular economy at the front of our mind.
Anthony: How do you create a company?
Amee: We started S’wheat when we were both studying, I was at college and Jake was at university studying completely irrelevant courses, but, yeah, we seen our classmates were going through reusable bottles quite frequently, always coming in with different ones, and we
wanted to know, why is that? And they would let us know that they became smelly or they dropped it or there were so many different reasons, and so we wanted to create something unique and practical, and then we didn't have any money because, of course, we were just studying. So we launched a presale crowdfunding campaign where we got our prototypes and we created a digital mockup and we said to everyone, this is what we'd like to create and you can preorder it - this was in the summer and you would get it delivered before Christmas - and we had a goal to raise £10,000. Luckily enough, 30 days passed and we had raised 22-and-a-half thousand pounds, so that was a really big push in starting the company and really allowed us to start our productions, and through grant funding as well, we were able to launch S’wheat.
Anthony: So you're creating your water bottle with a new organic plastic. Now, is that completely different from traditional plastics or do you have additives? I mean, the problem that you've mentioned is that things can leach out of petrochemical based plastics, but do you avoid that with the plastic that you've created?
Jake: Well, almost, I think it's 90% of our product is wheat stalk and bamboo. We try not to use any plastics, and if we do, it's always recycled plastics as well, it's really only our silicone.
Amee: Yeah, it's a patent-pending process and we don't use any melamine; I know some issues with bamboo based products and things is that they contain melamine, so that's really unique to us that we don't use any at all.
Anthony: Okay, you wanted to produce a bottle which overcame the problems that you identified, but your mission, in fact, is broader than that.
Amee: Yes, exactly, so we're a certified social enterprise and with every sale, we plant a trackable native tree and we remove 20 pounds of ocean-bound plastic from the ocean.
Jake: Yeah, and whenever somebody buys a S’wheat reusable water bottle from our website, they'll also receive a unique QR code and a link and they can scan that or click the link and they'll be brought to a page where they get to see where in the world we've planted their unique tree, and they can see what species it is, and a lot of stats about the tree, so it does make it really unique, you don't just get a S’wheat bottle, you also get a unique tree planted in your name.
Anthony: So that clearly adds to the cost, we’ll account for the fact that your price is really up there with the quality end. It's the top end.
Amee: Yeah, so I would say we're priced in the UK alongside a lot of the other main brands here, in fact, some of them we’re slightly cheaper than, but yeah, of course, you can pick up some reusable bottles very cheap out of lower-end stores, I guess, but, yeah, we are priced in the UK across the board of the kind of main brands.
Anthony: How long is your bottle likely to last?
Jake: Yeah, so the bottle will last as long as you look after it and you keep it clean and it will really only biodegrade when it ends up in landfill, it's not going to fall apart in your hand but it will biodegrade naturally once it ends up in landfill due to the pressure of landfill.
Anthony: That will biodegrade in the end which is very important.
Amee: Yes.
Anthony: At the moment you have it available in pink - do you have any other colours planned?
Amee: Yeah, so at the moment we do actually sell other colours, we're just sold out of them all. Pink has proven to be the least popular so that's why there's a little bit left but, yeah, we also have an oat colour which is a natural beige colour, we have green, we have blue and then we're also just about to launch a new colour which is black as well. They're all matte, they're all very appealing colours and I'm sure there's a colour for everyone.
Anthony: You're optimistic about the business, are you as optimistic about the world at large?
Jake: We're really optimistic about our business, we're not as optimistic about the world at large.
Amee: Yeah, I think everyone can agree that some days you definitely feel better about it than others, when you hear positive news it can really help make you feel a lot better about it, but yeah, I think overall we're seeing companies coming to us and wanting to make a change in their workplaces, especially big organisations that definitely create a lot more waste and they're wanting to make changes in that and I think that's definitely a really positive sign.
Jake: Yeah, they're wanting to reduce their plastic intake, they want to plant more trees, reach their carbon goals and, yeah, I think that's definitely all counting towards the bigger picture.
Amee: Yeah, I think it's no longer just a tick in the box program, I think a lot of them have a true interest in actually to make a difference now.
Anthony: Jake, Amee, thank you very much for talking to the Sustainable Futures Report.
Jake: Thank you so much for having us.
Amee: Thank you. 
Thanks again to Jake and Amee. They are at swheat.com - and you’ll find that link on the Sustainable Futures Report website. There’s also a link to the Plastic Pollution Statistics & Facts [2022] Report from Happiness Without. It’s worth a look.
I’ll be back on Friday to talk about the outcome of the Australian election and its implications for climate policy, and other sustainability news.
In the meantime, thank you for listening; if you are, thank you for being a patron.
I’m Anthony Day.
That was the Sustainable Futures Report.
Until next time.
Learn More Here:
THE REUSABLE PLANT-BASED WATER BOTTLE
Plastic Pollution Statistics & Facts [2022]
