Milko!
I was listening to Raglan local radio one morning as I drove back to town after a morning surf. An ad came on for a local milk delivery service. Yes you heard right, milk delivered to your door in – wait for it – glass bottles! Now a percentage of the many thousands of readers of this blog may be too young to remember home milk deliveries, which ceased in Australia in the 1980s. Those of us who do are likely to have fond memories of the clink of the glass bottles, and their little foil caps beneath which hid a blob of cream.
Considering the vast amount of energy consumed in recycling plastic containers, and that China no longer wants our recyclables, I reckon it’s time to bring back the glass milk bottle. And while we’re at it, let’s bring back glass soft drink and beer bottles too. Why take a perfectly re-usable long-neck (for our non-Australian friends that’s a 750ml beer bottle), crush it, melt it, and make it into another, identical, perfectly re-usable long-neck? Doesn’t make sense, does it? As you drink your next frosty schooner at the pub, consider how many other people have also downed a beer from the very same glass. We don’t expect the pub to recycle the glass between uses. Nor, come to think of it, do we worry that the fork we use for our counter meal has been in lots of other people’s mouths before we use it to convey our own chicken parmy. We just expect it to be washed between uses. Why can’t we do the same with bottles?
The naysayers will no doubt pooh-pooh the idea claiming it would be too expensive and blah blah blah. Maybe it will cost a few more cents per unit, but is it preferable to creating thousands of tonnes of plastic containers and then sending them off to landfill? I think so. Let’s help out the planet, encourage small business and create a few jobs by following the lead of the sleepy town of Raglan.
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