Making the most of midnight milk deliveries
We’re keen to reduce our environmental impact so we’re using glass milk bottles. Remember the good ol’ days when the kids put out the empties? It’s just like that but instead of tokens inside a bottle, we order and pay online.
Most weeks our Abletech office goes through around ten litres of milk. Until now, we’ve been putting out our empty plastic bottles on recycling day. Now we’re reusing glass milk bottles.
We’re using a delivery service set up by Pip and Steve Olds from Eketahuna. It includes more than just full cream milk. Eketahuna Country Meats delivers fresh and local meats and eggs too.
Our glass milk costs us the same as our plastic milk did, and we’re loving the flavour of milk fresh from the cows. The milk is pasteurised, but not homogenised, so it retains the traditional full cream milk flavour.
It’s not a perfect world. Our supplier delivers once a week so the milk sits in the back of our fridge for almost a week. There’s the fossil fuel factor of a milk delivery truck, and the greenhouse gas factor of cows. But we are happy about buying less plastic.
NZ — highest rates of household waste
New Zealand has one of the highest rates of household waste production per capita in the OECD. Yet New Zealanders are highly concerned about waste. We rank waste as one of the three topics we are most concerned about (Ministry for the Environment survey 2018).
Recycling is a great way to ensure that materials like plastic, glass and aluminium can be used over and over again and keep them out of landfill.
The Ministry for the Environment say that reducing unnecessary plastic items, reusing and recycling is important. Read more about why we need to care on their website, along with lots of ways each of us can take action.
To tackle the problem we are working towards a circular economy approach. This means taking resources carefully from nature and ensuring the products we make are designed so that the resources in them can be reused indefinitely. Ultimately we need to design waste, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions out of the system.
The Ministry for the Environment encourages New Zealanders to reduce, reuse and recycle.
Read more about our efforts
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We’ve recently switched to 100% renewable electricity
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We try to calculate Abletech’s CO2 emissions
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Adding electric power to a bicycle
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Keeping warm and sustainable in winter
