Hawke's Bay business owner Lucan Battison is treating the plastic waste problem in his area with deliveries of milk in glass bottles in his Barefoot Bottles ambulance. Photo/File
21-year-old Lucan Battison was sick of seeing plastic waste on the beach so he started Barefoot Bottles, a business that delivers milk in glass bottles straight to the doorsteps of Hawke's Bay residents.
Lucan Battison of Tainui, the owner of Barefoot Bottles, turned an old ambulance into a milk delivery truck.
"This ambulance popped up and I thought it would be mean, it looked pretty cool. You can't forget the ambulance driving past and it's got a V8 in it so it sounds cool too," Battison says.
Customers simply leave their clean bottles out and he refills them.
"When you have a bottle you own it, so you just clean it yourself in the dishwasher or use Milton solution and I refill it on the spot. So it's just like using the same bottle over and over again. It means I don't have to clean them."
Battison says he sold 300 litres of milk on the day Te Ao visited him to customers who want their milk in glass bottles. Photo/File
With happy customer after happy customer, he says demand for milk in glass bottles is surging.
"I remember on my first ever day, I only sold 40 litres throughout the day. And then like today, I just sold 300 litres today. That was only 8 months ago too."
He gets his milk from local company Origin Earth, which is all farmed locally in the Hawke's Bay area.
"It's fresh from the farm every day, pasteurised cows milk and then straight into my cannisters. So these get filed up every morning, I've got quite a few of them and they get reused. And then straight from that into the glass bottles and then you drink it."
NZ produces more than 23,000 tonnes of plastic bottle waste each year, and Battison wants to help reduce that number one bottle at a time.
Report by Aroha Treacher for Te Ao.