Would @WaldenLocalStaff consider using glass containers for your milk and kefir? I try to avoid plastic when it’s reasonable effort to do so. I wouldn’t mind paying a deposit, and returning them to you monthly like we do the coolers already.
I like that you provide honey and maple syrup in glass. I recycle them in my town’s regular waste management system. But I think it would be really neat if you took them back also. Being able to close the loop having you bring them back to the production source - would be amazing.
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Thank you for the thoughts and feedback Alex! We are always working on ways to improve our packaging to reduce waste. With our milk items, we have some info on why we are using plastic over on our milk info page here:
https://members.waldenlocalmeat.com/a2milk
I’ve included our thoughts from that page page below as well!
We strive to be a learning organization and to make the most responsible choices possible with the information we have. It has become a common belief that glass is superior to plastic when minimizing impact on the planet. In many cases this is true. However, in a recent study, glass bottles ranked the worst in a life cycle assessment that examined milk production. There are a variety of reasons for this that span production, transportation, reuse, and end of life recycling.
Firstly, common desert sand cannot be used to create glass. Rare earth minerals are required that are being harvested faster than they can be produced by nature. We currently use around 50 billion tons of sand every year mined from mountains and rivers. Large amounts of fossil fuels are needed for the furnaces used in production to melt and form glass products. Glass is also much heavier than plastic and requires greater volumes of fossil fuels to transport. It takes a little less than a liter of gasoline to make ~1kg of glass. The reuse of glass for milk requires significant water and energy use as well as the use of caustic chemicals adding a significant environmental toll.
Finally, only about 33% of glass in the United States is recycled. Aside from the difficulties in getting people to properly prepare their glass for recycling, broken glass is a huge problem. With milk specifically, returned bottles must go through a rigorous washing process before reuse that requires caustic chemicals. In small batch washing, these chemicals can be discarded every cycle creating both a safety and environmental hazard. This washing process also requires large amounts of water and energy (to heat the water).
Unfortunately, most glass is simply crushed and used for landfill cover since it’s easier and cheaper to process. Glass discarded in a landfill can take up to 1 million years or more to decompose. While there are many problems with glass, plastic is not without its own downsides. Only about 9% of waste plastic in the United States makes it through the recycling process. However, there are ways our members can help us reduce the amount of packing material that makes it into a landfill. Our plastic jugs can be washed and reused in your home in all kinds of creative ways. You can also check online to learn how to properly prepare materials for recycling and see what requirements your state has for processing.
We are always trying to further minimize our impact on the planet, and we hope to improve our packaging practices over time as we do recognize the problems with plastic. Our partners are not currently set up to package milk in recyclable cardboard cartons (which is the case for many small processors), but we will be doing more work on the feasibility of this. In the fall, your milk will arrive in a recyclable ½ gallon plastic jug.