Cutting Down on Waste
Posted: Thu 6 August, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Green, Stupidity, Thoughts 3 Comments »In the news today, there’s a piece about a Plymouth dairy that’s encouraging its customers to use “Milk Bags” – recyclable bags of milk, and a reusable ‘jug’ holding the bags.
According to the story,
Dairy spokesman Richard Pryor said customer research showed people wanted inexpensive and convenient ways to reduce the amount of rubbish they put in their dustbins.
“This development is another important step in reducing the environmental burden of the 130,000 tonnes of plastic used in milk packaging every year,” he said.
Obviously, Dairy Crest in Devon are using plastic bottles for delivering milk.
But it occurs to me, surely the single best way of reducing that tonnage of plastic used in milk packaging is to go back to using glass bottles instead of plastic ones?
Our milk gets delivered every other day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to the door in glass bottles. At the same time, the driver collects our used (and washed) bottles, and takes them to be reused. No ‘rubbish’ relating to the milk – the foil bottle tops go in the recycling bin.
On the (exceptionally rare) occasions when a bottle breaks, it gets put into the glass box, to go to the local bottle bank next time we’re in that direction. Again, no landfill, no waste – it’ll get recycled into a glass ‘something else’.
So, who is it who does our milk deliveries? Yep, it’s Dairy Crest – the same ones who deliver in plastic in Plymouth.
Seriously? The spokesman for Plymouth Dairy, his name is really Richard Pryor?
Sainsbury’s have been trialling plastic bag milk for ages.
I was thinking exactly this about glass bottles the other day.
We don’t have milk deliveries where I live. I can’t imagine it being viable, or, indeed desirable (my mother still has them, and it works for her, because she’s retired, but when she worked she used to get annoyed by late deliveries meaning bottles left all day on the south-facing front step).
I do agree that there needs to be an alternative to the tetrapak, and I recognise that carrying four glass bottles of milk back from the shop is no more difficult than carrying equivalent amounts of beer or wine, which we do without thinking.
The beer and wine bottles go in the recycling, but what would be ideal is a ‘reuse’ option, like back in the days when pop bottles carried a return deposit (except when the label said ‘no deposit, no return’ which was seen as a mark of modernity back then).