Crate expectations

A funny thing happened the other day, as I sat in gridlocked London traffic: the taxi I was in was overtaken by a milk float. A milk float. Apart from highlighting the ridiculously glacial speed of London traffic, it was the first time either the cab driver or myself had actually seen a milk float in many, many years.

Somewhere between me leaving home, 30 years ago, to live in the first of a series of flats, and then moving abroad, home milk deliveries seem to have been replaced by plastic bottles and cartons from supermarkets and convenience stores. Now, I'm sure this is not the case everywhere. With 5,000 people still employed in the UK in doorstep delivery, there are clearly many communities still being served by milkmen/milkwomen ("milkpersons" just sounds plain wrong).

As a child, the milk float seemed an intrinsic part of British life, along with power cuts and holidays spent exclusively wearing cagoules. In fact - and I'm sure someone will correct me - I can't think of another country where milk has ever been delivered this way. It's a practice that began in Britain in the 1860s as the spreading railways brought fresh milk cheaply into towns and cities from provincial dairy farms. By the turn of the 20th century, dairies were distributing milk to households via horse and cart, with the battery-powered milk float appearing in the 1940s, sometimes making calls up to three times a day due to absence of fridges in many households.

The clinking of milk bottles in crates and the whining of the milk float's electric motor was part of the early morning soundtrack of British communities. And now, through the prism of environmental concerns about how much plastic we use and how that distressingly ends up being consumed by whales in David Attenborough documentaries, it surely is time to reconsider the traditional British home milk delivery. Because it was the perfect recycling model: fresh bottles of milk on the doorstep at dawn, empties taken away. Bread, cream and yoghurt delivered too, with 'Milko' calling every second Thursday to have his bill paid.

My taxi driver and I concluded that the shift to buying milk in plastic bottles from the supermarket has coincided with the shift to urban dwelling. In 1975, 94% of milk was supplied in glass bottles. By 2016, that figure had fallen to less than 3%. In London, for example, the proliferation of new apartment blocks in gated communities has, surely, precluded the traditional milk delivery, coupled with the convenience of supermarkets (and, it is claimed, a lowering of costs, for the consumer and retailer alike) as our grocery habits have changed.

This, however, could be changing: with the world buying a million plastic bottles every minute, and annual consumption is expected to go beyond half a trillion by 2021, the glass milk bottle is poised to make a comeback. The Telegraph recently reported that Mark Woodman, who runs a dairy in Cardiff has recently spent thousands refurbishing an old milk float to meet new demand. "We've had 50 to 100 people call in this week," he told the online newspaper, "with 30 to 40 new customers off the Internet looking to cut down on their use of plastic".

Dairy UK, the trade body, says that doorstep deliveries of milk in glass bottles now total around a million per day, a modest increase over the last couple of years. Mark Woodman says he's seen a 30% rise of milk via traditional glass bottles over the same period. According to The Telegraph, traditional milk float deliveries have far from disappeared. Parker Dairies, a family-owned dairy in Woodford, Essex, continues to serve 11,000 homes, offices, schools and businesses in central and east London via a fleet of 25 floats. And depot manager ​Paul Lough says there is a clear resurgence: "I think the idea of going back to glass bottles and milk floats have captured people's imagination."

So, too, should be the idea of recycling. When I was a small boy, we'd take empty lemonade bottles down to the local off licence to get a shilling back on the return, an act of recycling before the phrase was in common use. In the Netherlands, I would take all of our household plastic bottles down to repositories in branches of the Albert Heijn supermarket chain, where the bottles would be sized and counted before the machine issues a voucher to be redeemed at the checkout against purchase. It really was that simple.

Where I live, next to the Thames at Greenwich in London, low tide reveals the scale of our indifference towards plastic waste. The piles - I don't exaggerate here - of plastic bottles lining the foreshore, or piling up in the mud of Deptford Creek illustrates the scale of the problem. And I'm part of it, if I look at my own consumption of single-use plastic bottles. Not only that, by my contribution to the problem: every time I visit Starbucks or Costa for a latte, there behind the counter are fridges full of plastic milk bottles. I'm sure these chains dispose of them responsibly, but you can't help wondering whether a trick is being missed by not returning to glass milk bottles.

In its recently launched 25-Year Environment Plan, the British government revealed that the UK's Marine Conservation Society found 718 pieces of litter for every 100m stretch of the country's beaches that it surveyed - and at least a fifth of this was from food and drink packaging.

The government also revealed that the total amount of plastic produced worldwide since the 1950s could become 34 billion tonnes by the middle of this century, with a lot of that invariably ending up in landfill or entering the marine ecosystem and subsequently the food chain. The government plan calls for a number of measures, from taxation to efforts to eradicate single-use plastics. Clearly, though, there's a long way to go.

The problem is, probably, not milk bottles but all the other bottles we get through - the impulse buy of a cold Diet Coke on a hot day, the need to carry a litre of Evian with you when travelling on London's broiling Underground. For that, I applaud the availability of tap water with which to fill up reusable flasks, and owners of cafes, coffee shops and restaurants lightening up about offering it for free, rather than fleecing us with overpriced plastic bottles of H2O. It really isn't that hard to return back to the pre-convenience age, when things were just that little bit more convenient for the environment.