IT took me a long time to realise that we are not all fundamentally the same. Forget what religious gurus or social scientists or the far left try to make you believe: some of us are, if not better than others, then certainly a lot brighter.
For example, since David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, millions of us have been eyeing the plastic in our grocery baskets and our waste-bins with loathing. We’ve started buying bananas unwrapped, and spring bulbs loose like old-fashioned sweets from jars. We proffer long-life mugs for the barista to fill, and clutch them self-consciously as we head to the office, apeing Michael Gove in our conspicuous non-consumption. Needless to say, while all these are worthwhile measures, our best endeavours are but a drop in an ocean awash in plastic.
Which is why certain individuals make you stand back in awe. One such is James Longcroft. A couple of years ago the Durham University graduate set up a not-for-profit bottled water company, Choose Water, to raise money for clean water for Africa. Then came the news that plastic water bottles are destroying the ocean and its wildlife. Instead of ignoring a problem that would cause an ethical headache for his venture, he stopped selling water in plastic bottles, and started working on finding an answer.
Longcroft’s waterproof, paper-based bottle biodegrades in three weeks (the metal cap takes a year). It costs around 5p more than a traditional plastic bottle, which might sound a lot, but is peanuts when it comes to protecting the environment. What is more, he devised it in his Edinburgh flat. He was not in a lab surrounded by chemists, but making a mess of the place he and his partner and children call home. Thankfully, he now has a property in Fife from which he hopes to launch his invention commercially.
Longcroft’s eco-bottle is what you might call a world solution to a world problem. First he heard about the effect of plastic pollution, then he dreamt up a possible fix. Simple, you might say. And for some people, relatively speaking, it is.
This young entrepreneur joins a long and noble lineage of British inventors whose unfettered imaginations have dramatically changed the world. It’s from Scotland, too, that some of the finest ideas have come, hence American historian Arthur Herman’s flattering book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Great ideas are international the moment they succeed, but for such a small country we’ve had more than our fair share of 100-watt minds whose innovations have transformed the way we live.
Whether it’s John Logie Baird and the television, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, or Ian Wilmut’s team and Dolly the Sheep, Scots have produced countless revolutionary ways of plugging gaps in our knowledge and technology. Our never-ending, rainy, church-going Sundays possibly played a part. But perhaps it has more to do with an education system that insisted you think for yourself, and wouldn’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. Of course with the majority of folk, no amount of tutelage could produce an original scientific thought. Faced with a meadow to mow, some of us would never have conceived of the iron plough share, or the rotary blade for cutting grass. We’d have let it flower, and sat back to enjoy the scene, while our stomachs rumbled.
Nor do inventors seem to have just the one eureka moment. They are not like those novelists who have only one book in them, or teachers whose enthusiasm dies after the first school year. For true inventors, ideas seem to arrive like buses, in convoys. Not all, of course, work. Logie Baird’s heated sock – which should have been a runaway success in these climes – was an abject failure, thanks to being partially made from paper. It wouldn’t survive the wash. Jam-making was another of his brainwaves, which also came to nothing. Who, at this point, would have thought he would be the father of the entertainment industry, or indeed that Bell’s telephone would be the basis from which our own hyper-fast connectivity springs, reshaping life as we knew it when we were young?
This is not to pile pressure on James Longcroft and those like him. If his bottle makes even a tiny dent in the mountain of plastic waste that is daily flushed out to sea, he will have earned his place in history and in our hearts. It is, rather, to reflect that cometh the hour, cometh the man, or the woman. Those who take a miserable view of the future do so without factoring into the picture the sort of people whose minds start to fizz under pressure.
Now what we need is a solution to traffic and obesity, dementia, international discord, and poverty and illness in developing countries. A daunting wishlist? Sure. Yet you can be confident that some of the brightest sparks on the planet are already addressing it. Human nature cannot be changed overnight, but as every good inventor knows, the way we behave can.
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