Future 50: Morgancoat - The South African manufacturer turning local into an advantage

Look around a supermarket and almost everything you see carries a label. Before the brand, barcode and product information are added, many of those labels begin as rolls of self-adhesive material. South African manufacturer Morgancoat makes enough of that material every year to cover Robben Island about 11 times. Its story began in 2007, when Richard Morgan and his father Mike developed machinery to apply recyclable barrier coatings to paper. The idea was ahead of its time, so they adapted the machinery and began manufacturing self-adhesive label material instead.