Fleeces get an eco-makeover

Donning a fleece - anywhere other than up a mountain - normally just makes the one fashion statement. And it isn't particularly flattering. But that could all change with the advent of the world's first "green" fleece, a jacket made entirely from recycled plastic bottles.

Eleven bottles to be precise, and it is on sale in a Marks and Spencer store near you now. The retailer has snapped up the revolutionary fabric as part of a £200m environmental overhaul of its £17bn business, and promises to use it to replace its regular polyester clothing. In so doing, Stuart Rose, its chief executive, has made himself the new pin-up boy for armchair eco-warriors and aspiring green businessmen everywhere.

One of those is Simon Lee, the entrepreneur behind the new fleece. Four years ago, Lee quit his job at a packaging company out of disgust at the amount of plastic and cardboard being wasted in the global supply chain. "Some of the products being sold were costing less to make than the packaging," he says.

His solution was to set up a new company called Greenpac to cure some of the packaging ills that plague today's disposable society. With the backing of some wealthy private investors, and his life's savings - "a few hundred thousand pounds in total" - Lee set off on a six-month quest for some likely innovations that his company could help bring to the market.

Back in 2003, most retailers were more interested in profits than saving the world. The green movement was still largely a fringe affair, and the notion that rubbish could be more than a dirty word laughable. Lee knew he faced an uphill task to sell his vision. "I was banging doors down trying to explain to directors that there were things out there they needed to know about or would want to get involved in," he says. Some of his arguments struck a chord with New Look, the discount fashion chain that was on its way to becoming the biggest shoe retailer in the UK. Lee had made the humble shoebox his first target. It leapt on to his radar because of the billions of tons of waste cardboard used. Lee says: "We would ask, 'Why are shoes sold in boxes?' Answer, 'Because they have always been.'"

His solution was a flat-pack version that uses half the material of a normal shoebox, weighs half as much and can be easily recycled. The "PacShu", a concept he patented three years ago, saves New Look from dumping an annual 520 metric tons of waste, which has slashed its rubbish collection bill by 42 per cent. Next is the latest high street name to consider jettisoning its old shoeboxes for good.

Another project - a spray coating for organic fruit and vegetables to prolong their shelf lives - is taking longer to get off the ground. The novel spray, which is made of edible substances including beeswax, has won the coveted stamp of approval from the Soil Association, the organic industry body, but has yet to hit the shops. The product, Natralife, was invented by two Israeli scientists; Lee's company has provided £1.3m of funding for the next 18 months, by which time he expects one of the world's big fruit growers to have adopted the technology.

Shrink-wrapped organic fruit and veg is the bane of any green-minded shopper's life. But without the chemical coating that comes as standard on non-organic produce, the organic versions would not last long. Natralife works by lodging minuscule particles into, say, a lemon's pores, and slowing down its respiration rate. The slower it breathes, the longer it lasts. Lee says: "This will help Third World suppliers who don't have sophisticated methods of distribution or keeping fruit ripe to compete."

So far, so green. But neither of these has the potential of the fleece to wake consumers up to the power of recycling. "There has to be something tangible there for people to see what's happening," he says. "It's not recycled until it's reused." Ultimately, Lee wants to develop environmental solutions as "brands in their own right". This, he believes, will help to cement the nascent grass-roots revolution that is forcing the high street giants to think seriously about how they can make their businesses more environmentally friendly. "It's key to educate the consumer about what things are made from and what can happen when they recycle," he says.

The Greenpac fleece has gone down a storm since hitting M&S stores before Christmas. The retailer would have used an estimated 6,000 barrels of oil a year to make the normal polyester kind, so selling the recycled version will save a lot of fossil fuels. If the idea of wearing plastic bottles seems odd, then just bear in mind that the bottles and synthetic yarn are made from the same material: crude oil - or rather, the extracted petrochemicals. To make yarn from used bottles, they get cleaned and cleaned again, and ground into flakes. Only the purest flakes can be used, which means that up to 30 per cent of the original bottle gets discarded. Those flakes are broken down into chips and melted. The molten plastic gets forced through a showerhead-like device to create strands of thread, which are intertwined to make yarn.

There is a price attached to the process. The recycled yarn is around 30 per cent more expensive than the ordinary version, but crucially, Lee says: "You are reusing waste, not using virgin materials made from precious fossil fuels. It's about closing the loop."

Greenpac, which has annual sales of £2m, has christened the yarn " Greenspun" and wants it to be used for much more than just fleeces. Already the Girl Guides have made bags out of the yarn, and next month New Look will begin selling a Greenpac black bag.Lee knows that the key to making Greenspun a success will be to create designs that are wearable and fashionable. He claims that consumers, "who have seen recycled products as being unfashionable, or not as good as the original, wouldn't know the difference with these fleeces". Now that's a fashion statement.

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