Considering the level of ingenuity, technical expertise and resources that go into much of our food packing it is truly incredible that the huge majority is used just once and discarded then requiring yet more ingenuity, expertise and resources to get rid of it. Why has so much human effort gone into making packaging and so little into how it can be re-used? The demise of the glass milk bottle reveals the forces at work that have made the re-use of food packaging so rare;

• Food hygiene; in the risk averse age that we live in cleaning packaging to the required hygiene standards has become difficult and expensive. Apparently getting snails out of bottles was a problem and you can imagine the outcry if a shell was found in a bottle but I don’t suppose they killed anyone.
• Extended supply chains; as we move from local to national to global markets the chance of getting packaging returned to source becomes ever more remote. It is much easier to return a bottle if your milk came from the local dairy.
• Flexibility and responsiveness rule; our slavish adherence to the free market, were every deal is subject to competitive forces, means that there is little stability in our supply chains. Planning for, investing in, and building the infrastructure required to collect and return packaging to the suppliers requires the kind of commitment to long-term trading relationships which are and anathema to current government and business practices. It is quick and easy to send out milk in carton or plastic but though glass bottles can still be the cheapest option they need stable and repetitive buying to pay back the much bigger investment
• Packaging is cheap and those who produce it do not pay to dispose of it or for the externalities of its environmental impact. The cost of landfill or recycling of milk containers is huge but the dairies or retailers are not paying. 

re-use at Riverford

We have a highly integrated, stable and reasonably local supply chain with long-term relationships with most customers and virtually all suppliers. This has meant that with a little thought it is possible to reuse most of our packaging material many times. Virtually all the UK produce in the boxes arrives at Riverford in re-usable wooden bins and plastic crates and leaves in returnable cardboard boxes. Some of the farm crates are over ten years old and have done hundreds of trips from field and back. The larger wooden bins typically last for seven years. The veg-boxes boxes themselves are designed to fold down for return and re-use. This makes them liable to tear at the corners and folds. They would typically do ten trips if all were returned but due to leakage in the system we are currently only managing four trips per box. If you are a customer, the single biggest thing you can do to reduce the environmental impact of your veg box is to return it; even if it is torn there is a better chance of it being efficiently recycled through us than the general waste stream.