Green bottler takes aim at entrenched water market | Reuters

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Green bottler takes aim at entrenched water market

CHICAGO (Reuters.com) - Bradley Schulman spends a lot of time setting fire to plastic bottles. He carries a small cooking torch on sales calls to help promote his start-up beverage company, Green Planet Bottling, a producer of drinking water packaged in recyclable bottles derived from plant starches.

When Schulman ignites a typical petroleum-based plastic water bottle during a recent demonstration, black smoke fills the air, soon accompanied by a noxious chemical smell, the result of carbon emissions. The same treatment applied to one of Green Planet's 16.9- ounce biopolymer bottles delivers a clean burn with virtually no odor.

Showing this dramatic difference is one way Schulman hopes to force change in the multi-billion-dollar bottled water market, an entrenched industry where large beverage companies, backed by a strong plastics industry, dominate the field.

"The front end, they get it," says Schulman, a veteran of the coffee and tea business whose former venture, Chicagoland Beverage Company, is credited with launching premium brands such as Intelligentsia Coffee and Mighty Leaf Tea, both now nationally recognized.

"The back end, they worry about it because they get tremendous pressure from the petroleum lobby, and the Cokes, the Pepsis, the Nestles who butter their bread and say, ‘Don't approve this guy,'" adds Schulman, who is Green Planet's founder, CEO and majority owner.

Even so, the winds may be shifting favorably for the company, whose eight full- time employees are primarily dedicated to making distribution inroads that will give Green Planet the ability to serve large customers ...

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http://www.reuters.com/article/deborahCohen/idUSTRE58T3TG20090930

http://www.reuters.com/article/deborahCohen/idUSTRE58T3TG20090930