Day 37: Grocery Store Adventures: Episode 2 - The Truth About Recycling

When I was little my mom used to always go to the the dairy farm down the road to pick up two Milk Buckets of milk that she pasteurized at home. Later, we got our milk from a friend who lived nearby and had a jersey cow that lived happily out on the field. This system was great. We knew the people who produced the milk, that the cows were happy and well taken care of, we knew that the milk didn't travel far from the cow to us, and this process had no waste in the form of plastic milk jugs or milk cartons.

Sadly, we stopped going down to the dairy after it changed hands, and then our friend's cow died. So, we started buying milk in plastic milk jugs. Although just picking up a jug at grocery store while shopping was  easier,  this milk was definitely not as tasty as the jersey's milk and was part of a more wasteful process than our earlier system. We also became less connected with where our food came from and the earth,  as seems to be the way of progress and civilization.

My topic for today is really recycling, but I hope my little anecdote got you thinking as much as I did about how our connection to food and the earth is changing and evolving - and maybe not for the better.

Being Green is really cool these days, and you see all those t-shirts promoting recycling. Don't get me wrong, recycling is great, but it's really not as sustainable as most of us believe it to be. It is not a closed loop, and when you recycle, say, a plastic milk jug, it never becomes a milk jug again because in the process of reclaiming the material, the viability and quality of the plastic deteriorates. Eventually, you end up with those non-recyclable plastics.

This is a brief overview of how it works:

In a perfect world, a plastic bottle would be recycled and turned into another plastic bottle of equal quality -but this is not the case (but remember that recycling still requires energy, water and produces waste - just not as much as other processes).  On the bright side, aluminium cans, PET 1 plastics and glass can be recycled into their same quality over and over.

However, HDPE number 2 plastics, which see their first incarnations as milk jugs, water bottles and juice containers can never be truly recycled and used as food-grade packaging again.

From here, the HDPE 2 plastics can laboriously be turned into things like plastic chairs, bins or be blended into a resin code 7 product - this is the end of the line for plastics, and it's next stop will likely be the landfill where it will sit for centuries.

Writing paper is the same - good quality writing paper is made from virgin fibers because recycled fibers are not quality enough, and they are turned into things like copy paper, toilet paper or cardboard - the end of the line for paper. So, recycling doesn't save all trees.

The other day, when grocery shopping I was hovering in the dairy isle -craving milk but not being able to justify the carbon cost of the milk and packaging when I spotted this:

Avalon farms is a local, family-run dairy, their production plant is located right here in Vancouver and their cows are in the Fraser Valley. They are actually the oldest continually running dairy in BC, and have been operating since 1906! I think unless I take up urban farming and start keeping a goat in my apartment, this is as local as it gets! One of the things I first noticed about Avalon milk was the container - it was made of glass reminiscent of the milk bottles of yester-year. I just had to find out more.

I e-mailed the contact person at Avalon farm and inquired about the glass bottles and found out that once they are returned to the grocery store, they are collected, cleaned and re-filled. (The pricey $1 deposit ensures that they get returned too!). I think this is probably the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly way of selling milk that I have come across since my childhood years.

I also learned that the organic cows at Avalon are let out to grasslands for 16 hours a day and are not fed corn-based feed (corn-based feed is the leading cause of cows producing excess amounts of methane gas since their digestive system isn't really made to digest corn).

The milk costs about $2.50 for a liter - not the cheapest, but its is the best milk I have had in a long time. Furthermore, I am supporting a local organic business. And, by paying more for the milk I am consuming less, which is better for the environment (see Day 2 of this Challenge), and I feel like I can justify buying milk now and again, and really savor this delicious treat! So, for the rest of the year I will try to continue buying local milk that comes in re-usable environmentally conscious bottles!

What do you think? Are there similar local business where you live? Do you think I can justify drinking milk by buying local, organic milk that comes in sustainable packaging?