Reuse and Recycle

If you’re over 50, you might remember that you were once able to return your used glass bottles – say Lucozade, or R White’s Lemonade – to the shops, to get back a small deposit (about 2 1/2p back in the ’70s), which was included in the purchase price. You might also have had your milk delivered in glass bottles. You’d leave the empties outside your front door at the end of the day for the milkman to collect in the morning (on an electrically powered milk float – was everything better in the good old days?) They’d be used again and again, or recycled when that was no longer viable (a glass bottle can be reused 20 to 30 times, and glass can be recycled countless times). And yup, some people are still having their milk delivered this way today – but not so many. (Check out themodernmilkman.co.uk to see if you can have yours delivered – they even do soya and oat milk.) Anyway, brilliantly we decided – well, the manufacturers and retailers did – that it was ‘better’ (i.e. much more…