Waitrose To Reduce Plastic Through New Milk Bags

Waitrose, Britain’s up-market supermarket chain is to start another eco friendly initiative today, with the sale of milk in plastic bags .
The grocery retailer will start selling pouches of milk, alongside special jugs to use them with, after green campaigners said the sale of millions of plastic milk cartons was threatening the environment .
The pouches contain 75 per cent less plastic than the bottles in which at least two-thirds of the 180 million pints of milk consumed by Britons every week is sold. Less energy is used in making them and they take up far less space when disposed of.
This is no the first time Britain’s retailers have tried to make one of their top-selling lines more eco friendly . In the Seventies the Co-op offered milk bags while Sainsbury’s tried six years ago, but met consumer resistance. Milk pouches have caught on in other countries such as Canada and India .
Asda has just tried out the ‘Greenbottle’ milk container made of biodegradable and recyclable plastics, and other supermarkets are considering how to reduce packaging .
Although the plastic bottle offered convenience, the oil and energy needed to produce them has taken its toll on the planet.
“Customers are increasingly looking for environmentally friendly solutions and the new milk packs and jugs will be top of their shopping list,’ said Jane Hills, Waitrose’s dairy buyer.”
“The eco-packs will make a radical difference to the way milk is sold within the UK .”
The one-litre packs will cost 91p, which is slightly more than Waitrose’s other lines of organic milk, while the plastic jugs will cost £1.99 and are a one-off purchase that can be reused.
Calon Wen, a small Welsh organic farmers’ co-operative that came up with the initiative and is supplying the milk, calculates that if all plastic milk bottles in the UK were replaced with the pouches, 100,000 tons of plastic waste would be saved from landfill sites every year.
Waitrose will run a trial in 17 stores based in London, Wales and Bath, the results of which will be carefully observed by other supermarkets.