Got Milk?

An American ad campaign starting in the early 1990s encouraging the consumption of milk.  You can find out more here Got Milk?  However, milk packaging accounts for a considerable proportion of our plastic waste.  It was not always that way.  In my childhood milk used to be delivered in a much more environmentally friendly way.  In reusable glass bottles delivered by the local milkman via an electric milk float.

One morning, just over a year ago, I got thinking about this very topic and decided to try a milk delivery again instead of buying 4-pint plastic bottles from the supermarket.  I signed up to Milk & More who promptly started delivering my milk a couple of days later.   You can also use referral code RF1KNT for £5 off your first order of £10 or more.

Being quite analytical I wanted to understand the amount of plastic saved as well as the price difference between the two ways to buy milk over the period of a year.  I knew it was going to be more expensive to buy my milk this way, but I wanted to understand how much more expensive.  This decision, however, was primarily about reducing our single-use plastic waste. 

It turns out that for our family of four this equates to saving 7.8kg of plastic milk bottle waste per year.  What follows is the cost and environmental benefit analysis of this switch from plastic to glass milk bottles.

Plastic Saving

A 4-pint bottle of supermarket milk contains 50g of plastic.  Smaller bottles contain a higher proportion of plastic per pint and therefore buying 2 x 2-pint bottles would result in more plastic waste than buying a single 4-pint bottle.

This comparison will focus on the 4-pint bottles that we typically used to buy (I am not about to buy additional plastic bottles just so I can weigh them).  Each week we would buy and put 3 of these bottles into recycling which is 150g per week of milk bottle plastic waste.  That equates to 7.8kg of single-use plastic waste per year.

This change alone has significantly reduced the amount of plastic in our recycling bin each week.  It does, however, come at an increased financial cost.  Though I must admit the additional convenience of having milk delivered to our doorstep every couple of days is great.  It’s also been easy to manage and change our regular orders online.

Cost Difference

This is straightforward, a 1-pint reusable glass bottle of semi-milk costs 84p.   Organic milk is 98p per pint (at the time of writing).  For this comparison, I will be looking at standard semi-skimmed milk as that is what we typically bought at the start of this experiment (we’ve since switched to Organic semi-skimmed – and increased our weekly milk bill even further as a result).

The supermarket price per pint differs depending on bottle size purchases (1, 2 or 4 pint bottles). Therefore, if you typically buy small 1pt bottles in the supermarket then switching to a milk delivery will have a more modest increase on your spending compared to switching from buying 4pt or larger bottles

If you typically buy 1-pint bottles from the supermarket then the price increase is just 24p per pint delivered by the milkman.  This rises to just over 55p more per pint compared to buying 4 pints plastic supermarket bottles. 

Our family of four were typically buying 12 pints of milk per week, three 4-pint bottles from the supermarket per week.  Costing £3.45 per week.

When we switched to Milk & More we reduced our consumption to 8 pints a week.  Therefore, I will use 8 pints per week for the comparison here, which would have cost £2.30 per week.

Milk delivery of 8 pints a week costs us £6.72 which is £4.42 per week more than the equivalent pint-for-pint compared to supermarket equivalent.  This is a significant £230 per year more than buying large supermarket plastic bottles. 

Had we not also reduced our milk consumption from 12 pints to 8 pints per week we’d have increased our annual costs by a further £114.92 to a staggering £344.76 EXTRA per year compared to buying plastic bottles from the supermarket.

Despite the additional cost it seems like a small price to pay for saving 7.8kg of plastic waste annually. 2.6kg of which came from reducing our consumption and the remaining 5.2kg from switching to glass bottles

If we’d been buying smaller supermarket bottles, the cost difference between supermarket and milk delivery wouldn’t have been as significant, and yet the plastic saving per pint would have been much greater due to smaller bottles requiring more plastic per pint than larger bottles.