A new eco friendly milk bottle has been invented (or is it recycled because the inventor first thought of it in 2007). A papier-mâché version. If you’re wondering how it doesn’t disintegrate then be comforted by the fact that it has a plastic liner. So it won’t go splodge in the fridge.

The new bottle is claimed to be more environmentally friendly than the common plastic milk carton. That’s because it uses less plastic just for the inner liner and it uses a nice green waste paper product for the outer carton.

However I would argue that the glass milk bottle is the most eco friendly method of transporting milk.

Why? Because the glass bottle can be reused again and again and again and this is the second best form of being green. The three R mantra of environmentalists being Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

We can’t do much about reducing our milk consumption, but we can reuse the storage medium if it’s glass. And then when they gets used up  when the bottle breaks it can be recycled. A papier-mâché can’t be reused. A papier-mâché  can be recycled but only a dozen times at most.

The reuse bit is dependant on their being collection facilities to collect unbroken bottles but this is just a different thing that needs to be done similar to all the changes in land fill collection methods – the weekly bin collection to you and me. The different thing being a small refund on unbroken milk bottles. It could be argued that collecting all these milk bottles and taking them back to the diary is a lot of extra work but I would argue it’s no different to all the extra work in recycling the cardboard milk cartons.

But then you would ask about the initial manufacturing costs as everything has to have it’s overall CO2 footprint examined and raise the point that it takes a lot of energy to produce glass whilst paper doesn’t need nearly as much especially if the papier-mâché is already a waste product. Whilst it is true that glass is a very energy expensive product to make from it’s original raw material of sand, mixing it with glass lowers the energy requirements and it uses up recycled glass. So here the papier-mâché wins out. And the papier-mâché version is made from a renewable product namely trees so there is a never ending source of it’s raw materials.

We then come to the end of life issue. With papier-mâché bottle it will eventually end up in a landfill site or hopefully in a composter, so long as the consumer has pulled the inner liner out and separated it. A glass bottle should never thrown be into a landfill site as it can always be recycled. For the greenies the glass bottle should win out here since it means that their precious trees aren’t chopped down.

And then we come the inconvenient truth that the cardboard bottle is made in Turkey and transported via expensive CO2 burning methods to the UK and it is more 30% expensive than plastic bottles.

SBML

Michael February 2, 2011 at 18:57

They used to sell milk in plastic bags in Guernsey. Not sure if they still
do. There was a man who broke down in a classic car outside our house one
night. We offered him a mug of tea, which he accepted after checking that the
milk wasn’t from a glass milk bottle. Something to do with the sterilisation
process not being up to scratch, making him proper sick if he drank it.

Zaphod February 2, 2011 at 18:09

If most recycling was ecologically counterproductive, it would still be
encouraged.

So, is it?

Ed P February 2, 2011 at 13:53

I did this when very small (yes, we were allowed out alone at the age of 8,
shock, horror!) – collect bottles from the neighbours, bins & wasteland
and take to the local shop for a few pennies (d not p) back. As Angry Exile
& TheNoseyMole say, it’s obvious and effective!

TheNoseyMole
February 2, 2011 at 13:29

Here in Canada, you pay a deposit on all containers then you return the
empties to a local bottle bank and redeem your deposit. This leads to a very
high rate of recycling, and a great way for the local Junior Hockey Team to
make some money.
Strange isn’t how everybody ignores the obvious simple
solution!

Angry
Exile February 2, 2011 at 13:20

The pub trade always used to manage to put empty mixer bottles in spare
crates and send them back on the dray to be washed and reused, and people
slightly older than me tell me they used to get a few pennies back when
returning glass bottle to the shops. Why’d it stop? I know there are bottle
banks but surely it’s less effort to wash it out than break the glass down and
make new bottles.

peter February 2, 2011 at 12:53

Alas for the days of yore when blue tits would carefully select the full
cream milk by the colour of the aluminium cap and peck through just that one.
But papier-mâché – how passé. No self respecting passerine would dance the
passepied for that, even in passing.
Over here in Australia we’ve long
since passed mere recycled milk bottles. Forget chewed paper or re-chewed cud,
we’ve invented the recycled cow. We started with the good old Australian
Fresian Shihawi and added slightly more than a dash of the Australian Milking
Zebu.
But then we sent some of out best trackers deep into Upper Bavaria.
There, under the hourly bells of Garmisch Partenkirchen is a breed known only
to the German Society for the Conservation of Old and Endangered Livestock
Breeds. Our trackers, hard to see at night and practised at sleight of hand,
calmly nicked some frozen sperm from a Murnau-Werdenfels bull who had stayed
out too late one bitterly cold winter night.
After months of tenacious
genetic engineering, was borne a recycled cow with bits so blue that none
could pass with out licking their lips.
Milk’s close to replacing beer over
here now. hic

Engineer February 2, 2011 at 11:41

It’s an interesting question – how ‘sustainable’ is almost anything? So far
as I know, there’s no accepted method of calculating that, consquently most
argument is down to personal opinion – or vested interest.

I rather like the idea of reusable containers. Years ago, milk was sold
door-to-door from the churn. The housewife (they still existed in those days)
would have an enamelled jug which the milkman filled from the churn. No
disposables at all. I’m sure something similar could be developed with
stainless steel pots having an airtight lid. The householder buys their pot
when they set up home, leaves it on the step in the evening, and wakes to find
a filled pot in the morning. A well-made pot would last for decades, and be
recycleable when it was beyond use. Very sustainable. It would mean depriving
the blue tits of their breakfast, though.

Joe Public February 2, 2011 at 08:23

Glass milk bottles have stood the test of time because they can be re-used.

However, they’re much heavier, so more energy is used in their
transportation; and, they have to be steam-sterilised (using more energy)
after each use before they can be refilled.

IMHO the death knell of glass-bottled milk occurred when supermarkets
started selling the stuff. They can’t be arsed to recycle bottles, so prefer
the (buyer) disposable containers.

The reliable, regular milkman who collects the empties when he/she delivers
the fresh milk makes an unsung contribution to saving the planet.

SadButMadLad
February 2, 2011 at 07:57

From what I gather the inner lining is not bonded with the outer carton. It
can be pulled out when empty.

Ed P February 2, 2011 at 07:36

If it’s plastic-coated papier-mache it surely cannot be recyled at all.
There’s no eco(nomic or logical) way of separating these two component parts
for recycling. Unlike glass, coated paper cannot be sterilised at high
temperature and safely refilled. Unlike old glass, which provides cullet for
the next bottle production, bonded paper/plastic is useless.