Streetlife

Good luck. It may be better to phone for milk to be delivered. It's a lot more expensive than supermarkets but we only use 4 pints a week so don't mind, plus the milkman can also deliver other products. Are you giving up on plastic bags as well?

Thank you Janet K.  I'm giving up everything disposable made of plastic.  I have always refused plastic carrier bags but still mange to end up with bags of plastic food packaging bags and film.  Now my determination to give up disposables entirely has forced me to think of ways of getting the things I need/ want without the attendant plastic litter.

im trying to give up plastic, i do recycle the lids etc of bottle and tubs, the mathew project takes them, but its finding things to buy with out plastic which is hard..........

You could look at www.zpm.com. They sell Trolly Dolly. Not a cheap outlay but easy, tough alternative to disposable and the best bit is net bags which you can put fruit and veg in and not the plastic bags in supermarkets.

Just an idea... some 'plastic' items in M&S are actually vegetable starch... Not sure about milk bottles though?

Good luck!! It's a very admirable ambition! I wish we could just take our containers back to the supermarket and re-fill them from a tank, charged by the litre.

I have Tesco Everyday Value UHT milk which comes in cardboard boxes.  I can leave loads in my cupboard and it hardly goes off, and use it when I need it.  I hardly ever use milk anyway, as it is meant to be the food of baby cows - calves. And goats milk tastes better and is better for you - this also comes in cardboard boxes.
Norwich City Council needs to develop the recycling of plastic more - we are miles behind recycling on mainland Europe.

Jonathan

Love what you are doing. I am perplexed by not being able to recycle plastic trays etc-  .. your methods may be the answer. May be Sarah's UHT is the answer too. Any ideas on how we can pressure the council into investing into innovative plastic recycling?  

Janet K: Trolley Dolly seems a good idea (though not sure if it suits me by name..) but it doesn't solve my problem of everything being WRAPPED in plastic.
Sarah V: I don't personally shop at Tesco because of their bullying methods in getting planning permission, their ubiquity and the fact that they're putting small shops and businesses out of business destroying local community and don't care about it.  The one line for them is the bottom: money.
  However, I think you probably mean Tetrapak boxes whxich are actually a composite of cardboard and plastic and therefore impossible to recycle.  You can only compost them and then throw away the plastic.  I did find reference to 'Greenbottle' made of cardboard and sold in Asda.  But they are part of the evil Walmart empire...
The struggle for environmental and social justice continues....!

Rob, I can remember when I was a little girl (in Hertfordshire), and we could do just that, it was called 'buying loose'. My mum would wash out the glass bottles and jars for salad cream, ketchup, etc, and take them to Kingham's the grocers in the High Street. There was a row of similar, but giant bottles, each with a lever/tap to dispense the contents into our containers. Quickly done, charged by quantity and no waste. Yes, I'd love to go back to that system, and plastic bottles would actually be more practical for it.

I'm one of those people to whom a 'single-use' plastic bag doesn't exist. I always have several in my bag and I use each of them many times. It's surprising how even the flimsiest of them will usually last a lot of trips. I never pick any up whilst shopping so it's amazing how many I accumulate, just from ones that other people give me.

Johnathan you are quite right about Tesco.  But I do not have a car and I am in a wheelchair. The Tesco delivery system is a godsend.

That's a difficult one - I can't remember seeing glass milk bottles anywhere in shops. I think Tetrapak boxes are worse then the standard plastic milk bottle which can be easily recycled and I don't think UHT milk has any nutritional value at all. I suspect the best place to look at would be local farm shops or health food shops? Nortons Dairy is a local producer based in Frettenham but they bottle their milk in plastic, too.

you could try the Milk & More site, they do home deliveries still by milk float, and I've just checked you can buy a 1pt glass bottle of milk semi-skimmed for 71p

I think Milk & More took over the old Co-Op and Dairy Crest routes

Their site for milk and other essentials is ~ http://www.milkandmore.co.uk/home_delivery/milk.htm

That link will take you directly to their milk order page, all the other sizes are in plastic bottles but its good to see they still do the traditional glass bottle which you can wash out to be returned

Also its helping out a local business that tries hard to compete with the bigwig supermarkets

Hello - Rosemary is right if you go on the site and put in your postcode you can find out who will delivers and on what days I've just found out that Gary Meacey can deliver milk and much more to my door on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Good luck x

Jonathan HH: you can take tetrapaks to the recycling centre in Swanton Rd where they have a bin for them.  Presumably someone recycles them.