Can someone who knows about 'being green' please settle this debate for me?

[BlameItOnTheBogey]

So DH and I are having an ongoing discussion about milk containers! In an effort to be more green, I have bought a milk jug and started using bags of milk in it rather than buying the plastic milk containers each week. DH is saying that this is actually less environmentally friendly because although we have cut down on packaging, the bags are not recyclable whereas the plastic containers are. I think he is wrong because recycling should be the last option if you can't reduce waste, not the preferred option. Does anyone know who is right?

I would tend to agree with you, although we have a milkman and then we just reuse milk bottles! But I know this isn't always an option and I was under the impression that it was better to reduce and reuse first, yes.

You should use glass milk bottles

Yes, glass clearly preferable but our milkman delivers those plastic containers and I haven't found anywhere else to buy glass. Am jealous of your glass bottles Terry, I feel quite nostalgic about them!

i agree with your DH.

you're putting the bags straight into landfill. you haven't really reduced. you're still producing the waste, but it's going into the ground instead of getting recycled.

another thing to consider is the effects of each of them being manufactured, but i guess that's harder to find out!!!

this is the reason we still buy plastic bottles rather than the bags. I have just discovered thogh that milkandmore will deliver in glass bottles (i think!) round here so going to give that a go

We have a milkman who still delivers in glass bottles too (hence my first comment).

But given the choice between recyclable plastic bottles and non-recyclable bags I would go for the bottles.

Providing of course that the bottles are recycled and not just shipped elsewhere to landfill...

Thanks thisisyesterday but does it not make a difference that the bags reduce packaging by 97%? So although it goes into landfill, it is a tiny amount and there must be e.g. energy used for recycling which we are reducing too?

Is there nowhere that recycles the bags? If they are not picked up by the council there might be a recycling plant nearby which would take them. At one point our county didn't recycle plastic milk bottles, but the next county did, so I used to save them up and take them to a plastic bottle bank there when I was passing.

The bags say not recyclable on them unfortunately.

That seems silly, if the point of them is to reduce waste!

I have to admit to never having seen these bags as we live in the 1970s sticks with glass bottles. In fact DH's best mate is a dairy farmer so we sometimes by-pass packaging altogether and fill up plastic milk jugs from the milking shed

But, if you are serious about trying to be really green, then perhaps it would be worth writing to the manufacturer with your concerns that their packaging wasn't recyclable? If enough people lobby them they might change it...

If the bags use 97% less raw materials to make than the bottles, then I think you must be right. The bottles may be recycled, but what is made from them the second time around will be lower grade stuff and probably not recyclable again - certainly not indefinitely. You'd need to recycle them 30+ times to get the same usage per raw material and even that completely ignores the processing costs of recycling.

I did a lot of work on this in my last job. You're probably right that the bags overall have a lower impact, which might seem counter-intuitive to some but recycling itself is not impact free - this depends a lot on the materials & how far they travel. My view is don't sweat what is really a very, very small environmental impact whichever choice you make and definitely don't fall out with your DH over it.

Some facts for perspective:

• The vast majority of packaging that goes to landfill is not consumer packaging but the shipping packaging that you never see.
• Household clingfilm makes up a larger portion of the waste stream than consumer packaging.
• A far bigger environmental issue with your milk? Whether it's organic or not because the environmental impact of the pesticides and fertilisers that is used on the grain (which often comes from deforested Amazon too) to feed the cows is much bigger than any amount of packaging.

To be honest, as those in tbe field know, the every bit helps thing is actually bollocks I'm afraid - the only hope with them being that people move on the bigger changes. In order to move to a truly sustainable world in the timescales required we need lifestyle changes like flying once every few years rather than every year, eating meat a couple of times a week not every day and insulating all our homes properly.

So don't worry too much about your milk packaging - you're probably right but if you let your DH have his way to save an argument it's no big deal.

glass is better than the normal plastic bottles by the way, but not by as much as you might think. Although glass is relatively cheap (environmentally) to produce per ton, you need a lot more of it for a bottle and it is then heavier (& so uses more fuel) to transport.

The environmental cost per milk bottle for glass is more than 4x that for plastic. BUT typically a milk bottle is reused 12 times, so that makes it 3x better overall (neglecting energy costs of cleaning & extra transportation).

You probably ought to consider if the milk bottle tops are made from recycled and not virgin aluminium too as new aluminium is fantasically expensive (energy intesive) to produce.

If the pouches are really 75-97% less environmentally damaging than plastic bottles to create then they should be at least as good as glass bottles arguably?

Some info here

Brilliant - thanks everyone. Only on mumsnet could I rely on finding fantastically knowledgeable people so quickly. Will report back to DH who suggested I try here in the first place.

also.... i expect the transportation costs of the milk in bags is less then in bottles as they weigh less and take up less space (and dont need to be upright etc) so i expect more milk can be transported per van / lorry if it were in bags hence reducing transport emissions

Read an article the other day about Waitrose stopping selling the bags as they didn't catch on - the transport costs in tranporting less weight, and the fact that many people still can't/don't recycle plastic bottles, made the bags better environmentally.
Some supermarkets do recycle plastic packaging, despite the claims on the plastic itself.

I checked and apparently if you can recycle plastic bottles (type 1,2 and 5, usually), then you can throw any type 1 or 2 plastic in too.

I recently bought milk from sainsburys in bags and they state the bags can be recycled in the carrier bag recycling bins you see outside most supermarkets now. I know that the milk in bags is not yet available country wide,so you might not be able to get them where you live.

FWIW I think you are right-saving 97% packaging probably stacks up pretty well against recycling plastic bottles when the environmental impact of their transport and processing is taken into account.