Doris Systems achieve top honours

AN INVENTOR whose kitchen table project developed into a worldwide enterprise has picked up a Green Business award. Nelson entrepreneur Ray Britner’s Doris Systems Global Ltd, which operates from a small workshop on the Clayton Street Business Park, finished second in the North West Business Environment Award’s Environmental Innovation category, with his revolutionary blast cleaning system.

The cleaner, named “Doris” after Ray’s late mother, is safer and quieter than other systems, and creates hardly any dust. It uses recycled crushed glass as an abrasive, is extremely lightweight and uses only about 40% of the energy of previous systems. Ray’s creation earned him a higher placing in the awards than huge companies such as Jaguar and Laing O’Rourke – even though he is yet to celebrate his first anniversary in business.

Ray has been advised and assisted by the No-Limits Eureka programme to establish firm patent protection of his ideas internationally as a system so successful as this may well tempt others to copy.

The system was officially adopted as a graffiti buster by Pendle Council when Doris Global was established as a limited company in August last year, and it has since become a global brand.

Doris has been shipped across Europe and as far afield as Australia, and is used by major companies such as the National Grid on its oil rigs and pipelines. Ray Britner, of Beresford Street, came up with the idea for Doris after giving up his tree-felling job following a chainsaw accident in 1982.

He is now turning to development of further versions of the system, and a couple of other ground-breaking ideas. He said he was lucky to have had the backing which inventors find difficult to come by. Ray said, “Inventors like me tend to be lunatics, because you’ve got to think outside the box, so very few of us are fortunate enough to have people believing in them as people have in me.”