For more than a year, the marriage of Danny and Teresa Clark of Mesa was dominated by trying to change the way products are packaged.
“It was 100 percent, 24-hour-a-day thinking,” Teresa Clark said. “We did research to the end of the Internet. There were a lot of sleepless nights, but what kept us going was the passion and drive to know that something had to be done.”
The result is a recyclable, fully biodegradable plastic bottle produced by ENSO Bottles, the Clarks’ Mesa-based company. The bottles — a collaborative effort of chemists, microbiologists and manufacturers, among others — are primarily used by a handful of water companies.
The Clarks hope to expand the bottles’ reach to such products as soda, shampoo, medicine and wine.
“We didn’t invent anything ourselves directly,” Danny Clark said. “We worked with manufacturers and compounders. We were able to tweak it and bring it together to develop a product that is not only recyclable, but breaks down naturally.”
The process of developing organic materials and synthetic polymers to bond with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — the resin typically used in plastic containers — took about 18 months.
Danny Clark said bottles that use starch-based and oxo-degradable plastic break down in compost environments, but not landfills, where most nonrecycled containers end up.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” Danny Clark said. “We tried this material and that material and ran the biodegration tests. We would do additional research to find compounds to mix together better. The issue was getting the right stuff to mix together from a chemistry perspective. There were dozens of mixtures to go through, and making it biodegradable was probably the easy part. The hard part was getting it to mix with the plastic.”
Among the water companies using ENSO bottles are Balance, Aquamantra, Ecoviva and Project 7.
Martin Chalk, co-founder of Balance Water, said his company spent more than a year looking for a suitable bottle before choosing the ENSO product in November.
The production is still in its infancy, Chalk said, and there are challenges.
“The bottles are clear, but not as clear as regular PET,” Chalk said. “It can vary from batch to batch. You have to get the temperature just right when you blow the bottle forms. It’s still a learning curve, but over time, as biodegradable bottles become more popular, the machinery should be able to cope with it better.
“It’s kind of like a new printing-press process — you have to have a master technician get it just right. Soon, it will become more foolproof.”
A recyclable, biodegradable bottle costs about two cents more to produce.
“There’s more steps,” Teresa Clark said. “But I haven’t heard anyone say they were against paying 90 cents for a better bottle as opposed to 88.”
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