MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Entrepreneur Tasha Green
TASHA GREEN, 46, started the eco-friendly company Weaver Green with her husband, Barney, in 2016. Now, their rugs, blankets and cushions made from plastic bottles are stocked globally. The couple have three children. Growing up on a farm with a family who were among the first organic farmers in Britain meant I had an early awareness of our impact on the natural world.
My parents made apple juice and cider and even the labels were printed with vegetable dyes.
But I went my own way and got a degree in psychology. Realising I’d be a terrible psychologist, I ended up moving and found a marketing job with the surf brand Animal.
I settled down and had children, but my partner and I were on different paths. Our relationship broke down, leaving me a single mother with two children, aged three and 18 months, yearning for the farm and home.
I returned home with no money and no idea of what to do, but I felt liberated and optimistic. My parents were thinking of retiring and, because there weren’t many other job opportunities in Devon, I persuaded the bank to lend me money to buy the family business.
I also bought a dilapidated house with no electricity or water and did it up to rent out for holidays. When people stayed, we’d move out into a mice-infested 1960s caravan on the family farm.
After three years back home, I bumped into Barney — now my husband — on the beach. He’d just split up with his wife, so was not in the best place to start a relationship, but we immediately hit it off.
We love to travel and, on a trip to Turkey, we had the idea for Weaver Green. We saw a piece of rope crudely woven from unravelled plastic bottles.
That was my light bulb moment. I realised we could reuse waste plastic to create a yarn that would have all the properties of plastic — tough, durable and waterproof — as well as offering a solution to the rubbish in our seas and landfill.
It took seven years to develop the yarn. At times, it felt like we were banging our heads against a wall. People didn’t believe we could do it. We had to find money and be prepared to lose it. Now, we have 60 looms and work in areas that are very polluted by bottle waste, such as the Ganges in India.
Today, the tide has turned against plastic and big businesses are now coming to us for advice. The future possibilities seem endless.