Tuesday 4 December 2007

MILKING A STORY

Today’s headline in the Shields Gazette sends out a very mixed and confused message. Local schools will not now receive their milk in glass bottles, but plastic containers. The local Green Party is against the move on the grounds that glass can be reused, plastic cannot. Fair enough, but surely the energy required to make the glass creates a serious carbon footprint, and together with the cleaning, sterilisation and replacement of (broken) bottles, outweighs the negative issue of using plastic. When last at the Middlefield’s Village, I noticed that a skip existed for plastic. Can it therefore be recycled? The paper must have been short of news today, because this is in some ways a non story. However, with 13,000 cartons used a day in the region (500,000 so far this year) does represent a lot of plastic.

What surprises me more is that schools still offer milk. I thought the “Milk Thief” Thatcher put pay to all that in the seventies?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Reduce, Re-use and only as a last resort Recycle is the waste hierarchy. Re-using glass bottles is by far the best environmental option in this situation.