Dairy company Abel & Cole launch refillable milk bottles made from 100% Polypropylene (PP) that safely allows for multiple refills and is completely recyclable.
By reusing the bottles four times, 60 tonnes of carbon can be saved each year compared to a glass alternative and save 450,000 single-use plastic milk bottles.
In a blog post, the dairy company shared it took it three years, seven teams and three failed experiments to create the fillable milk bottles.
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Abel & Cole sustainability lead Hugo Lynch wrote that while glass bottles are easy to sterilise and cost effective they have two disadvantages as glass is “brittle and heavy.”
“As milk supply chains got longer in the 20th century, the industry moved over to single-use plastic packaging that cost significantly (roughly 6x) less and did not need to be collected back which suited the growing supermarket model better,” he continued.
“In a sense, this change was extremely logical, but it has led to a great deal of resource waste in the form of plastic pollution. It also required dairies to install specialised filling equipment that works for plastic bottles but, in many cases, can’t be retrofitted to work with glass packaging except at huge cost that would need to be passed on to customers,” Lynch added.
Dairy farmer Ed Gosling told the BBC customers will be “positive as there’s “no loss in convenience.”
Gosling also tested the Abel & Cole bottles and added: “They weigh 40g on average, compared to 200g for glass so there’s less fuel used to transport them.”
