I spent about two years of my life tending a small herds of goats that provided milk for my young family. This news story about a dairy switching to bags reminded me of my reason for making the move to producing milk in my backyard. I lived in an isolated spot in Canada at the time and during the spring thaw, the road on which I lived had become unpassable. I started thinking about adding milk producing animals to my little hobby farm on the day that I was carrying 16 kilograms of milk bags across a 1/4 mile of mud.
Here is the container that I chose for milk storage:
Time constraints, lifestyle choices and even municipal bylaws make something as extreme as goat farming impractical for almost everybody. You are left with trying to figure out which milk container has the least environmental impact.
Here is a list of American Dairies that offer milk delivery in glass bottles.
Milk cartons are coated with plastic and are not always recycled.
Bagged milk uses 75% less Plastic than Jugs.
July 21st, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Hi. I don’t know if you drink soy milk or just cow’s milk. I’m trying to get a letter-writing campaign going to persuade Wildwood foods to abandon the plastic in their soy milk cartons. Care to participate?
Beth
July 21st, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Oops. I guess I can’t use html in comments. Let’s try this again. The URL is:
http://www.fakeplasticfish.com/2007/07/soy-milk-situation-write-to-wildwood.html
Or if that doesn’t work, feel free to contact me.
Beth
February 15th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
can milk bags be recycled? I’m in Toronto and we have cartons, bags, and jugs available to us. The cartons keep the milk protected from UV light, which speeds up degradation. Our recycling program takes the carton. We stopped using bagged milk because our program doesn’t accept milk bags and we haven’t been able to figure out how to reuse so many bags.