Milk moves from bottles to the bag

One of Britain's leading supermarket chains is to start selling milk in plastic bags after green campaigners said the sale of millions of plastic milk cartons was threatening the environment.

Waitrose will start selling pouches of milk, alongside special jugs to use them with, from today. Campaigners hope the scheme will be the first step to abolishing plastic milk bottles, thereby reducing landfill and saving the energy used in their manufacture.



Britons consumes around 180 million pints of milk a week, of which at least two-thirds is sold in plastic bottles, which began to replace 'Tetra Pak' cardboard containers in the Nineties. It has recently been estimated that only one in four plastic bottles is recycled.

This is not the first time Britain's retailers have tried to make one of their top-selling lines more eco-friendly. The Co-op offered milk bags in the Seventies and Sainsbury's tried six years ago, but met consumer resistance. Milk pouches have caught on in Canada and India.