Meet our wonderful partner, Green Bottoms

We’re super excited to catch up with Mark Smith, Green Bottoms co-founder. A crucial partner in our Pura NappiCycle Bristol nappy recycling trial, Green Bottoms has been striving to reduce nappy waste for 16 years, helping the nursery sector find better solutions for their used disposable wipes and nappies. Green Bottoms also supplies nurseries with Pura products, helping them make the switch to eco-friendly baby care. Read the full story here.

Why did you start Green Bottoms?

Green Bottoms was founded 16 years ago by myself and my co-founder Simon Hunt. I was just about to become a new father, so nappies were on my mind! Disposables are so convenient but 8 million disposable nappies are thrown out daily in the UK. That’s 3 billion annually. We saw an opportunity to help with the nappy waste problem, specifically for nurseries which (due to the nature of their business) generate a lot of nappy waste.

After conversations with individual nurseries and nursery groups, we realised that they were a really underserved sector in regard to the service they received from the traditional waste industry. Starting off by collecting nappy waste for recycling, in 2018 we also began supplying high quality nappies and wipes, at competitive prices to nurseries, making the job of running nurseries and nursery groups that little bit easier.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the Green Bottoms service works?

Yes, it's quite simple from a nursery's point of view. We deliver next week's nappies and wipes at the same time as we collect last week's nappy waste. I think we're unique in doing those things together. Traditionally, these services are provided separately so combining those two tasks into one visit is a differentiator for us. It’s convenient for nurseries and an environmental win!

We work with around 500 nursery customers and each nursery is really important to us. The traditional waste industry is dominated by a few big players that have tens of thousands of customer sites but we're the right size for the nursery industry and can offer personalised services to each individual nursery.

We're always looking to do the very best thing that we can in regard to our customer’s nappy waste, helping divert it from landfill. We love to get involved in exciting projects that innovate when it comes to dealing with nappy waste - like the trial currently running in Bristol.

When it comes to supplying nurseries with wipes and nappies, a key thing for us is delivering the highest quality, most environmentally friendly products we can at the right prices to our customers. In 2023, we switched to Pura as our main supplier of nappies, for market leading sustainability with quality and performance to match other big brands and we're really enjoying supplying Pura to our customers.

We cover most of England now. Our most northerly customer today is in Catterick, and we work from there downwards basically down to the south coast. We cover London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, those large urban areas and everywhere in between. Around about a third or more of our business is in London and the Southeast. We don't go to the tip of Cornwall or up into Northumberland and the Lake District, but we're growing all the time, and we certainly cover most of the population of England.

Could tell us a little bit more about why you chose to work with Pura?

We look for companies and brands that share our values. Our customers want the best performing disposable wipes and nappies from companies that care about the environment, and they've got to be competitive on price as well. That's the reason why we work with Pura.

Many of our customers are now using Pura’s zero plastic wipes and in doing so, when you look at it across a nursery group, they're replacing millions of single use plastic items each year - just by making the switch from traditional baby wipes to the Pura’s zero plastic wipes. That's data we record and share with our customers who then share that with their families. It’ something that we're really proud of and just part of the work that we do with Pura.

You mentioned the Pura NappiCycle trial in Bristol. Would you like to you talk a little bit more about your involvement?

I’d love to. We used to work with a well-known leading brand of nappies, but we were looking for a company with a better environmental story and who better shared our environmental values, so we started speaking to Pura among other brands.

One of the things that made us really excited about working with Pura was the brand’s ambitions around nappy recycling. Pura has an association with the nappy cycle facility in South Wales and had ambitions for a larger nappy recycling trial, to expand on an earlier trial that was completed in Bristol.

We already have an established business in Bristol, the Southwest, and the wider surrounding region, and we were really excited about the opportunity to work together and to get some of our customers’ nursery waste recycled. We wanted to be part of a trial that demonstrated that it is possible to do better things with nappy waste. We thought it was a great opportunity to raise awareness of better solutions for nappy waste because as a company that's in our DNA - that's what we're all about.

Before the trial, we were already collecting waste in the M5 corridor, Birmingham down to Bristol. So now all the nappy waste for the nurseries we visit in the area is being recycled as part of this project. As part of the trial with Pura, we've also got about 120 households that we're collecting nappy waste from (at their homes) and we're hoping to expand that number next year.

We're collecting the waste from nurseries, from households, and we're taking it to a site that's operated by Bristol Waste, another fantastic partner on the trial. And once it's aggregated at that site, it's then taken over the Severn Bridge to the nappy cycle facility in Wales, where they repurpose that material.

One of the things they're doing there is using the nappy waste as an additive for asphalt. So you've actually got roads and paths that are now being made using recycled disposable nappies. And I just think that's so fantastic! We're thrilled to be part of what's going on there, and we hope to expand on that next year.

Green Bottoms is using business as a force for good. Can you tell us a bit more about your social and environment impact?

Yes, it’s something we love to talk about. Let’s look at environmental impact firstly. We think that, over the course of our life, we've diverted tens of millions of used nappies from landfill. We’ve helped people switch from single use plastic wipes to zero plastic wipes, by supplying them with eco-friendly products like the amazing Pura zero plastic wipes. We estimate that we’re helping swap around 10 million plastic baby wipes to zero plastic wipes annually.

The way that we deliver a combined service (collecting our customers’ waste’ at the same time as we're delivering the nappies and wipes that they need) cuts thousands of road miles each year and we think that might be a saving of around two tonnes of CO two every year. This is also something that we’re delighted about.

You asked about social impact, and that's something that we care about just as much. Simon and I are proud that we've got the business to a level where we are able to devote some of our time into looking at how we can have the best social impact.

Together with Pura and with one of our mutual customers Childbase, we've been supporting a charity this year called Baby Basics. They are an amazing charity with about 56, centres across the UK, staffed by volunteers. People who need help are referred to these centres by professionals, and through these centres, Baby Basics has helped one in every 120 newborns in the UK in the last year – so they have a massive impact.

Together with Pura and Childbase, Green Bottoms, has donated over 40,000 nappies to Baby Basics this year. We've also helped them with a winter coat drive. Parents have donated winter coats that no longer fit their children to nurseries and Green Bottoms has collected them and delivered them to Baby Basics. The charity has then distributed them across its centres so those coats can help keep other children warm this winter. When I think about my children at home and how quickly they go through their clothes, I think it’s a fantastic initiative.

We're looking at ways in which we can help Baby Basics further next year. They're an amazing charity. They work so hard. They really care about the quality of items that they provide to people who need help and I admire the respect and care that they show for people. I'm really delighted and honoured that Green Bottoms and Pura could be involved with Baby Basics this year.  

This is not the only social impact initiative we have. We have nurseries in London that serve areas of high deprivation, and we've donated thousands of nappies and wipes to those as well. A new initiative for us is we're actually sponsoring two of those nurseries after nursery staff explained to us that some of their parents are having to make decisions such as whether to buy nappies or buy food. We decided that we could help by delivering wipes and nappies free of charge, so parents don't have to be bringing those items in from home.

We've done some good social impact stuff this year, and it's an area of the business that that really excites us and we're passionate about. We really want this to be part of what Green Bottoms is about, and we're looking to do more of those things next year.

To find out more about Green Bottoms and the good they do, click here.