| Colorado - The Telluride Watch
By Marta Tarbell
Zutler Honored for Sustainable BIOTA
March 3, 2005
As members of the Colorado State Legislature opened their BIOTA water bottles Monday, Sen. Ray Rose introduced Tellurides David Zutler to the crowd.
Zutler, Rose observed has created "the first sustainable industry"s in Ouray and San Miguel counties.
Zutlers BIOTA bottled water, which debuted at the 2004 Telluride Bluegrass Festival, is just now being placed on the shelves at 141 King Soopers and City Markets throughout Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
And while the water, collected at a &aposprotected source about two miles above Ouray,&apos is readily marketable all on its own, coming, as Zutler puts it, from &aposone of the highest protected alpine springs in the world," what makes it thoroughly unique as a bottled beverage is this: BIOTA comes in "plastic" bottles that are 100 percent biodegradable. With Americans throwing away approximately 30 million petroleum-based plastic water bottles every day (more than 100 billion bottles a year!), the relatively young bottled-water mega-business has brought with it significant environmental hazards.
"There are these two little companies, Cargill and Dow," Zutler told the Telluride Watch Friday, reached by cell phone in Denver and asked for a brief history of BIOTA, which is available in three sizes-one liter, one-half liter and a 12-ounce "Stubby" bottle.
"They got together and formed a joint venture," Zutler went on, as Cargill/Dow LLC, and developed the corn-based resin that the bottles are made from.
Serendipity mixed in with tragedy on a global scale, figured in Zutlers hookup with the new product.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Zutler was scheduled to meet with the financiers and the manufacturers of the plastic bottle that would hold BIOTA water.
"We were all ready to use the normal petroleum-based plastic bottles," he recollected. And then, he "turned on the television just as the second plane hit the World Trade Center," and knew that now, the BIOTA project would likely stall.
Six months went by as Zutler looked for other sources for funding. Then, in May, 2002, he read a letter to the editor in The Telluride Watch from longtime Telluride resident Jimmy Pettegrew (Pettegrew has since relocated to Florida). "He was talking about how all the water bottles are polluting the earth," Zutler recollected, a charge that set him thinking.
"I remembered a University of Nebraska study about making plastic out of corn, and wondered, Whatever happened to that?"
An Internet search delivered the answer; within a few hours, Zutler was reading about the Cargill/Dow project where researchers were "developing resins for making plastic from corn."
The resin, he reported, which "looks like little BBs," is molded into "what looks like a test tube with threads on top" that goes on "into an injection, blow-molding machine in our plant in Ouray&apos that makes the bottles. At the biodegradable bottles next stop on the Ouray factory assembly line; "Theyre filled and packaged and out the door."
A full-time staff of 14 runs the Ouray BIOTA plant; it is poised Zutler says, to produce 2.5 million cases of bottled water a year. It is his hope to provide &aposa planet-friendly option&apos to consumers who at present, according to the Container Recycling Institute, throw away more than 89 percent of plastic water bottles every year.
"BIOTA is the perfect combination of premium spring water and environmental respect," Zutler observed.
Serendipity figured in the history of BIOTA once before, more than two decades back, when Zutler and his brother, Michael, settled on the name Blame It on the Altitude for their bar on main street (next-door to Sofios) where BIOTA headquarters still stand).
But when he tried to figure out the five-word mouthful of a name, friends pronounced it simply too long.
And so, in an inspired moment, Zutler alphabet-souped the name to BIOTA-unaware, at the time, that biota is an actual word in the dictionary, meaning "the flora and fauna of a region."
And so the water that may some day help preserve flora and fauna throughout the world was welcomed to the floor by Sterling, Colo. Representative Diane Hoppe. With or without its corn-resin container, Hoppe had this to say: "We want more of your Western Slope water." |
