Arkwright’s Revenge

By Tom Posted on June 21, 2011 Leave a comment

by Chris Forecast

Recent packaging news suggests that a dispensing specialist is in talks with a number of UK diaries about trialing self service filling machines for milk, to be used in Supermarkets in conjunction with a plastic pouch.

This follows on from an award wining WRAP funded trial for a refillable fabric softener. Various refilling options are being discussed, such as single serve pouches, as well as refillable pouches that consumers bring with them.

Packaging reduction within this sector has had mixed success in the past, for example Waitrose have recently withdrawn milk pouches because of product wastage, where as the Sainsbury’s ‘Jugit’ system has proven to be popular.

In simple terms plastic bottles offer the consumer a very effective and user friendly solution to the their concerns of transporting milk. They are robust, well sealed, and easy to pick up and open, and it’s clear that if you make any changes from this solution you need a very good reason for the consumer to adopt the alternative.

Also if packaging reduction results in increased product wastage, then that in turn increases the Co2 footprint, and the multiple retailers in fact need to be going in the opposite direction!

But to hear that a refillable solution is being investigated for milk is actually welcome news. The challenge is how make sure that the Co2 lifecycle for the solution is lower than the existing arrangement, if not then it’s just window dressing. For example 72% of HDPE milk bottles in the UK are presently recycled, and this figure is rising, “by contrast the recycling credentials of the refillable pouch are not clear” www.nampak.com/Sustainability-Report.aspx

But let’s not forget the old adage that “there is no such thing as a new idea, just a new opportunity’. In this country we’ve already got a long tradition of refillable milk packaging, and one despite the efforts of the multiple retailers refuses to die out.

It’s true that Arkwright’s corner shop may mostly be gone now, to be replaced by the corporate alternative, that as they say is progress. I wonder though does the same fate lie ahead for our humble milk man?