PLASTIC FREE JULY

Hello readers. This month we want to talk about a topic that apparently has been getting plenty of coverage over the last year or so and that is plastic waste. Now we have to admit that even though we like to think that we are pretty intelligent (especially for cows) we hadn’t picked up on this issue until just the other day when, while in the shed during milking, we heard a customer telling Number One that besides the fantastic taste and the freshness, the other thing she really liked about Dolly’s Milk was that she keeps it in GLASS bottles. ‘GLASS bottles’, we thought, ‘what’s the big deal about that?’ She went onto say that before she started getting Dolly’s Milk, she was having to throw out several plastic milk containers each week into the rubbish collection and besides the bulky nature of these containers, she realised the damage they could be causing the environment. So being curious in nature, during our morning paddock talk time we decided that we should learn more about this issue.

As usual when we need to find out stuff we have two options: 1. Ask Number One, Bossman or Mooman or

2. Use MOOGLE. So this time to prevent any risk of the look of disbelief that we didn’t know what was going on around us, we decided on the latter. Barbushka, who is our latest technology whizz in the herd, decided to look it up on MOOGLE and report back on what this is all about. Well, it seems that there is something to this whole debate about plastic waste and recycling. Every year globally, hundreds of millions of single-use bottles such as milk , soft drink and water bottles end up in land fill sites or in the oceans and only a very small proportion are recycled. It has been reported that a typical UK household uses 480 plastic bottles annually but only recycles 270 of them. A recent survey by Greenpeace found that of the billions of single use plastic bottles the global soft drink companies sell each year only 7% had been made from recycled plastic. It seems that food companies do not like using recycled food grade plastic. Coca-Cola alone produces more than 100 billion throwaway plastic bottles every year The figures are staggering-480 billion plastic bottles were sold in 2016 and it is projected that this figure will increase to 580 billion by 2021 and most of these will up in land fill of the oceans, some of which will be ingested by fish or birds. If these projections aren’t alarming enough experts warn that some of this plastic is already finding its way into the human food chain. Scientists recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic and recent research reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish. Humans are not designed to digest the toxins contained in plastics that work their way onto their dinner plates. And remember plastic bottles are made using petroleum among other chemicals and these compounds take hundreds of years to decompose. If you fill a plastic bottle 25% full, that’s roughly how much oil it took to make the bottle. For a single-use disposable item, that’s a lot.

So what can you do about this? Not a lot that would make any dent in the global use of plastics but you can join the movement ‘Plastic Free July’ that the Stratford District Council is promoting – as individuals you can all make a difference. Of course one way you can reduce your use of plastic is by getting Dolly’s

Milk in glass bottles. Bottles are available at the kiosk and they are reusable – in fact we are seeing customers still using the same bottles they purchased when we opened nearly

5 years ago and they still look as good as new. Most of our customers use glass bottles.

So please get in behind the ‘Plastic Free July’ movement and come on out to Dolly’s Milk and get your fresh, creamy and natural milk in Glass.

See you soon.