How chopsticks nourished a company's dream

Beco Pets regards itself as Great Britain's biggest manufacturer of eco-friendly pet products and accessories. Today this young duo of entrepreneurs creates product ranges that, as they say, are better for pets and better for the environment. All of their products are designed in Britain. Beco's range covers the four main life activities of dogs and cats: fetch, eat, poop and sleep - in other words, toys, bowls, poop bags and beds. Beco's dog and cat bowls are made from bamboo fibres taken from off-cuts when chopsticks are produced, and Beco beds contain stuffing made from recycled plastic soda bottles. Toys, like bones, are created using 100 per cent natural rubber. The company also uses discarded rice husks in its products.

"Bamboo is an amazing material. It's a type of very fast-growing grass, which is one of its fantastic properties," says design director and Beco co-founder Toby Massey. "Because it can be reproduced very quickly it's highly sustainable. Bamboo also has incredible properties of high strength, which is why it is used in lots of products. It's grown across Asia and the type of bamboo we use is actually the waste material from chopstick factories. So there is no deforestation involved of old bamboo, and we are not damaging the environment of pandas, which live off bamboo. According to China, the population of pandas is now on the rise again, great news."
Certain species of bamboo can grow three feet (nearly 1 metre) in 24 hours. In some climates, it grows at a rate of 4 cm per hour. 
London-based Beco Pets, which began trading in 2008, collects bamboo waste fibres from factories across China and now processes 25 tons of bamboo, rice husks and natural fibres per month, including 15 tons of bamboo per month. "We don't use fresh bamboo, but waste from factories, created when they cut out chopsticks. It is effectively dust fibres. They sand down chopsticks nice and smooth so people do not hurt their hands, and that creates a fine dust," adds Massey.
"Those fibres would normally be burned or ploughed back into the ground as landfill. Instead, we had the idea of combining them with natural plastic using corn starch, moulding them into the shapes we require. So far we have sold more than two million Beco Bowls to 43 countries."

Beco Pets was formed by chance after two university graduates in their early 20s were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. Toby Massey, then aged 22, was living 6 000…