Milk – there are lots of issues around milk and I’ll get to some of them in future blogs.
Three days a week I pick up glass milk bottles outside the front door. I often stop and listen to bird song but sometimes I scurry back indoors to shut the door on the wind or the rain.
A doorstep delivery of milk is a very British thing – and has become rarer and rarer – but with the world moving towards delivery of books, groceries and almost anything else to your door then maybe milk deliveries are making a comeback.
My milk is there before 6am and it usually arrives some time around 5am. I’ve hardly ever seen my milkman (or milkperson) but his (or her) deliveries are incredibly dependable and a part of my life.
So, here’s one dilemma – should I pay a lot more for milk to get doorstep deliveries or get my milk cheaper by walking down the road to the local Co-op?
I like the convenience, and to some extent the tradition, of milk bottles on my doorstep and that is one reason why I’m prepared to pay the extra. I also like the idea that my milk comes in glass bottles which are reused – that feels sustainable but I have no idea, actually not a clue, on how the balance sheets of carbon emissions, pollution etc would look. I am using the rule of thumb of ‘re-use is good’ to support a decision I’ve made for a whole bunch of other reasons.
And one of the reasons I pay more for milk is that I regard it as support for a service that is more important to others than to me. Although I can get milk at the shops (and I do sometimes if needed, but I regard it as a top-up) this is less of an option to those living further from such shops, and the old or infirm. So, I regard it as a small help to others that I bolster the financial viability of doorstep deliveries.
I’ll come back to milk over the next week or so, but even this very cursory run around some of the issues shows that consumer choice is pretty difficult. The sustainable consumer has to take economics, social and environmental issues into account – usually with rather hazy information on all of them, and always with a difficult task of combining the different aspects into a yes or no answer.
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Badger cull has made me turn my back on dairy (and meat too). Even organic labels do not prohibit culls or hunting on farms. Soy and rice mik for me now.
Stuart – I’ll get on to that later!
You could always eat Scottish meat.
BTW I assume you’ve checked to see what controls are exercised in the production of the soya beans and rice you consume.
“Soy and rice mik for me now”
Glyphosate and arsenic, localism be damned
Soy for milk brand I used is from Europe. Consuming soy direct rather than feeding to animals is far more sustainable.
Stuart – really? Which country please?
Alpro. Website and packaging claims soy is sourced from France. I don’t know their pesticide policy so there may well be lurking glycophosphate but I’m fairly confident environmental impact and animal welfare issues will be less than dairy. Open to being proven wrong. I’d rather see land for animal feed and grazing given over to biodiversity. I don’t think any meat, seafood or dairy really stands up to scrutiny if you care about conservation and alleviating poverty (except maybe insect protein?) but I am a recent convert and it’s taken me 40 years to stop being in denial. There is actually very little soy in the milk it turns out… only a few percent from memory. Mostly water.
I wish it was possible to have your own reusable containers that you could take to the shops for refilling for practically any fluid, one(s) for the ‘edibles’ – various milks, fruit juices – and other(s) for washing up liquid, cleaners, shampoo etc. I would absolutely love to do that, but I suspect that there might have to be a change in health and safety regulations for that to be possible which would mean putting more responsibility on to the consumer, but I think we need to be doing more of that anyway. There might be scope for fish and chip shops to sell reusable (and easy to clean/insulated) containers to their customers who would bring them back whenever they wanted fish and chips – in which they case might get a wee discount for saving the chippie some packaging which could also be passed on to a charity if the customer wishes. Might be a niche market at first, but could grow. We are getting to a stage where we really need to consider carrying round a set of reusables with us all the time – bags obviously, but there’s also reusable coffee cups now, reusable straws, good to take your own cutlery to avoid the plastic guff and also some containers should you be going to a restaurant or event and there’s spare food to take away, we really need to challenge any awkwardness about not wanting to waste food in such circumstances.
Les, laundy and washing up liquids are available as refills (Ecover is one brand) from your friendly ‘loose foods/hippy products’ shop (the places where there are tubs of organic quinoa, loose spices, local honey, fairtrade sweets etc.).
I believe they still come in a plastic pouch, an improvement, but what I was looking for was being able to put the liquid directly into your own container.
We refill our own bottle of ecover at the local health food shop. No plastic pouches to take home!
A couple of farms near me sell milk on the farm. They have large dispensing machines you place your bottle or whatever it is under the dispenser, select how much milk you want, pay for it, and it dispenses the milk. One of the farms has a shelf full of glass bottles which you can buy via honesty box if you don’t have your own bottle.
I did not know this could be done, thought there would be a plethora of regulations against it. Good news, thanks!
Best thing to do is just scrap dairy and meat altogether:
Greenhouse Gasses
Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all worldwide transportation. Transportation exhaust is responsible for 13% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from this sector primarily involve fossil fuels burned for road, rail, air, and marine transportation.
Livestock and their by-products account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
Methane is 25-100 times more destructive than CO2 on a 20 year time frame.
Methane has a global warming potential 86 times that of CO2 on a 20 year time frame.
Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.
Emissions for agriculture projected to increase 80% by 2050.
Energy related emissions expected to increase 20% by 2040.
Cows alone produce 150 billion gallons of methane per day.
Even without fossil fuels, we will exceed our 565 gigatonnes CO2e limit by 2030, all from raising animals. (the limit deemed to be safe for human survival).
Water
Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) water use ranges from 70-140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption ranges from 34-76 trillion gallons annually.
Agriculture is responsible for 80-90% of US water consumption alone.
Growing feed crops for livestock consumes 56% of water in the US alone.
Californians alone use 1500 gallons of water per person per day. Close to Half is associated with meat and dairy products.
2,500 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of beef. (NOTE. The amount of water used to produce 1lb. of beef vary greatly from 442 – 8000 gallons. We choose to use in the film the widely cited conservative number of 2500 gallons per pound of US beef from Dr. George Borgstrom, Chairman of Food Science and Human Nutrition Dept of College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Michigan State University, “Impacts on Demand for and Quality of land and Water.”)
477 gallons of water are required to produce 1lb. of eggs; almost 900 gallons of water are needed for 1lb. of cheese.
1,000 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of milk.
5% of water consumed in the US is by private homes. 55% of water consumed in the US is for animal agriculture.
Animal Agriculture is responsible for 20%-33% of all fresh water consumption in the world today.
Land
91% of all Amazon Rainforest deforestation is for animal agriculture.
Livestock or livestock feed occupies 1/3 of the earth’s ice-free land.
Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Animal agriculture contributes to species extinction in many ways. In addition to the monumental habitat destruction caused by clearing forests and converting land to grow feed crops and for animal grazing, predators and “competition” species are frequently targeted and hunted because of a perceived threat to livestock profits. The widespread use of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers used in the production of feed crops often interferes with the reproductive systems of animals and poison waterways. The overexploitation of wild species through commercial fishing, bushmeat trade as well as animal agriculture’s impact on climate change, all contribute to global depletion of species and resources.
Livestock operations on land have created more than 500 nitrogen flooded deadzones around the world in our oceans.
This represents the largest mass extinction in 65 million years.
2-5 acres of land are used per cow.
Nearly half of the contiguous US is devoted to animal agriculture.
1/3 of the planet is decertified, with livestock as the leading driver.
Waste
Every minute, 7 million pounds of excrement are produced by animals raised for food in the US alone. This doesn’t include the animals raised outside of USDA jurisdiction or in backyards, or the billions of fish raised in aquaculture settings in the US.
A farm with 2,500 cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000 people.
130 times more animal waste than human waste is produced in the US alone – 1.4 billion tons from the meat industry annually. 5 tons of animal waste is produced per person in the US.
In the U.S. alone livestock produce 116,000 lbs of waste per second. This is enough to cover the land mass of San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Paris, New Delhi, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Rio de Janeiro, the state of Delaware, Bali, Costa Rica and Denmark every single day.
Oceans
3/4 Of the world’s fisheries are exploited or depleted.
Fishless Oceans are predicted by 2048.
90-100 millions tons of fish are pulled from our oceans each year.
As many as 2.7 trillion animals are pulled from the ocean each year.
For every 1 pound of fish caught, up to 5 pounds of unintended marine species are caught and discarded as by-kill.
As many as 40% (63 billion pounds) of fish caught globally every year are discarded.
Scientists estimate as many as 650,000 whales, dolphins and seals are killed every year by fishing vessels.
40-50 million sharks killed in fishing lines and nets.
Rainforest
Animal agriculture is responsible for up to 91% of Amazon destruction.
1-2 acres of rainforest are cleared every second.
The leading cause of rainforest deforestation is livestock and feedcrop.
Up to 137 plant, animal and insect species are lost every day due to rainforest destruction.
26 million rainforest acres (10.8m hectares) have been cleared for palm oil production, a staggering 136 million rainforest acres have been cleared for animal agriculture.
1,100 Land activists have been killed in Brazil in the past 20 years.
Gavin – not exactly a comment there.
🙂 the first line was my comment, the rest was just scientific exploration.
Gavin,please explain what your point is.
It looks like Gavin had decided to list some of the global resource impacts of animal agriculture and I not surprised he would want to.
A very good explanation of what was listed above can be found in these two books:
“Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat” by Philip Lymbery
(and the front cover is quite good).
“The Cowspiracy” by Keegan Kuhn
Cowspiracy is slightly US biased but I think worth looking at. It also mentions how US law can impact investigative journalists examining the meat industry which could quite possibly impact all of us when/if we enter a trade agreement with the US.
“We choose (sic) to use in the film”
What film was that? Cut! Paste!
I would not be welcoming a return to glass milk bottles, at least as they existed in years gone by. I have difficulty in gripping things, thanks to a cop who deliberately stomped on my hands in the back of a police van after a ban Trident rally, and I just would not be able to pick up and hold a glass bottle. The large handled plastic jugs are what I need (I also buy pre sliced and chopped veg for the same reasons) if I want to be able to continue using milk. For people like me who have issues with their grip and don’t have full use of our hands (for whatever reason) plastic jugs (and pre sliced fruit and veg) are a godsend.
All that driving around the roads at dawn must kill quite a few birds and even hedgehogs – if you still have any of the latter in Northants Mark….that’s assuming they use a petrol/diesel van and not one of those oh-so-slow, electric milk delivery vehicles.
Nick – few hedgehogs but I’m pretty sure it’s electric.
“All that driving around the roads at dawn must kill quite a few birds and even hedgehogs”
I have no more data on this than you do but I sincerely doubt that door-step delivery of milk represents a significant mortality factor for birds or hedgehogs.
I’ve discovered that the local Lidl store is stocking milk from the local dairy (under Lidl’s own brand). granted, it’s still plastic bottles, but at least it cuts down road miles that the milk has travelled. Turns out that the local dairy is building it’s own plastic bottle factory to again to cut down on road miles due to the bottles having to come from a plant somewhere in England. Does not solve the issue of plastic use, but at least it reduces the amount of CO2 etc produced from their transport.
We hear a lot about “high quality food” these days. But what does this actually mean? How do we define quality. Is it purely about nutritional value, or also about environmental impact and welfare? How would we discern between high an low quality milk for instance. The environmental impacts of dairy are well documented. Highly nutritional food can also be produced in a very unsustainable way. While the choice for the consumer?
Peakaboo,definitely no low quality milk these days the testing is unbelievably efficient with massive reprisals on any failure of any of the many tests.First thing the tanker driver does on each farm is take a sample for laboratory testing back at the dairy.
Yes, I was wondering whether your milk comes in an electric milk float like in the old days ?
If it does, there’s a huge lesson – and super-quick way to solve a whole stack of problems. Here in Bristol most of our roads are now 20mph limit. Most deliveries are by diesel vans that can do 90mph and cross Europe and their engines are usually running while they make their delivery – how many of them ever leave the 40 mph limit, I wonder ? What would be the impact of switching to something like the old milk float which is fit for purpose but no more ? The batteries for a 100 mph range at no more than 40 mph would be tiny compared to a Tessla or even a Nissan Leaf – and no doubt the vehicle itself would be massively cheaper – add a tiny bit of push/pull – a generous scrappage/ trade in for the diesel and city centre charges and a huge chunk of diesel air pollution gone, just like that.
“Most deliveries are by diesel vans” Hey why dont we put all those deliveries on one van paint it red and call it something catchy like Royal Mail.
Modern British society is infantilised on milk and its derivatives. How did we evolve lactose tolerance so quickly?
From Cheddar Man to milkman.
Perhaps it was because cannibalistic rituals went out of fashion
Hi Mark
My suggestion (like many others it seems) is an obvious one. Give up dairy & meat altogether. It is not as difficult as you think and you will feel better for it in so many ways. The meat & dairy industries are amongst the most cruel, inhumane & environmentally-unfriendly on this planet so it must sit very strangely alongside your passion for nature. I would suggest you watch some documentaries, starting with What the Health and Cowspiracy, both free to view online, or via Netflix. Kind regards. CH
tea with cow’s milk — that’s the most difficult one. Any decent alternative?
And then milk derivatives are everywhere in processed foods.
green tea?
It makes I laff that carnophobes persist in using terms like “milk” and “butter” to describe vegetable drinks and foods, or drool over reports of factory-grown artificial pink-slime burgers that mimic “bleeding” when cut. No matter, look, against all prior behaviour the EU decided to grow some nuts and declared that purely plant-based products cannot be lazily passed-off as ‘milk’, ‘cream’, ‘butter’, ‘cheese’ or ‘yoghurt’, which are reserved by EU law for animal products. But the ECJ wimped-out on coconut “milk”, peanut “butter”, almond “milk” and ice “cream”.
They didn’t go far enough – they should have prohibited the sale of tofu as “food”, as it is merely a profitable scam to make gullible people eat calcium chloride, calcium sulphate and magnesium sulphate by coagulating these inorganic salts with soy, which is indigestible to humans unless cooked to inactivate protease inhibitors and lectins.
I notice the COOP milk is organic. Does your milkie deliver similar? If so a dilemma indeed. If not then organic all the time (not that I drink milk but do consume dairy)
Just like the rest of me, baby! 🙂
The local milkman/woman is one of the small links that still bind together our increasingly atomised communities. The way that every interaction we have with others has been reduced to individualised monetary calculation is one of the most pernicious trends of capitalism.
Vegan alternatives might be less costly than animal milks to the planet, but rather than see this as an invidious either/or choice, and withdraw my support to a local community service, I’d prefer to support doorstep deliveries by local suppliers whilst expanding the options to include genuinely eco-friendly milks.
As Michael suggests above, why not ask your milkie to deliver plant based alternatives to dairy. You (assuming you are vegan or vegetarian) will benefit and so will the rest of the world. Hey, the milkie could also carry bread and potatoes like ours used to when I was young. The enterprising milkie may also do croissants!
I have had milk delivered to the house for 2 decades but stopped because the company could not confirm that the farmer got any more for the milk than from a supermarket. I now buy cheaper organic milk from … a supermarket