Recently I’ve found myself having to buy more and more milk. It is not because I am a huge Cow Juice fan, but because I have one-year-old twins in the house. It’s inevitable that my family have to consume near industrial quantities of the white stuff every week. But every morning when I pour the milk from one big disposable plastic container into a small reusable bottle (which by the way is nearing its first year of use and still going strong), I can’t help but wonder…how much is the milk I’m feeding my girls costing the planet? Can I buy milk and still be green?

The milk industry, it seems, have an unnecessary but serious problem that is proving costly not only financially but environmentally. Plastic bottles are a big problem in general but perhaps one that could be avoided in something as essential as milk.

As big chain supermarkets get even bigger, their efforts to undercut local
milk producers has turned the industry completely to plastic. Even the arguably greener milk cartons are less available. If they are available, chances are that it will be more expensive than its plastic counterpart. To make things worse, with the excuse of demand and profitability, reusable containers have been unceremoniously dismissed and forgotten. Local producers who would have normally depended on ‘reuse & delivery’ are now turning to plastic to be able to stay competitive with the mega-stores

Where have all the reusable glass bottles gone? Why have we moved away from this?

It seems these days supermarkets are making an effort. The latest comes from a couple of big chains in the UK. The milk pouch…(which by the way, are extremely common and popular in less fortunate milk producing countries like Peru…)

Your first milk pouch comes with a reusable milk jug into which you fix the pouch. The system has been rolled out in Sainsburys and is now on trial in Tesco.

But at Waitrose, the eco milk pack trial has been rather weak. Their customers didn’t bite. Too much waste was being caused by the non-sale of pouches – and they have since been pulled from the shelves.

Sainsburys says that switching to bags could save 1.4m kilos of packaging each year. Since we only recycle one in four HDPE plastic cartons, the skinny milk bag does take up a fraction of the equivalent space in landfill. Plus, transporting milk in bags is more efficient and helps supermarkets to reach their eco packaging targets.
They are being described as “super eco”.
I am not so sure. Yes, they reduce waste going to landfill and plastic used. But the old-fashioned rinse-and-reuse glass milk bottles used no plastic and, as each bottle was reused an average of 24 times, it spared a lot of landfill.

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