The greener way to buy your milk - in a bag you can recycle

Now the great British pinta faces another transformation - being sold for the first time in environmentally friendly polythene bags.

The Waitrose supermarket chain is piloting the project with the organic farmers' co-operative Calon Wen to offer shoppers a greener way to buy milk.

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Customers will be able to buy the milk in the lightweight "eco-packs" - which can then be transferred to a reusable milk jug for storage.

And, more importantly, substantial testing has been carried out to ensure the pack does not burst on the way home from the store.

Milk packaging makes up a high percentage of domestic waste in the UK, with about 100,000 tons of plastic bottles going into landfills annually.

But both the new jug, which will sell for £1.99, and the packs, which will cost 91p for a litre, are recyclable.

Waitrose says the new packs are made using renewable energy and need only a quarter of the plastic material used for an equivalent polybottle.

Dairy buyer Jane Hills said: "We believe our customers will appreciate help with their personal environmental and recycling endeavours.

"We are always looking for ways to reduce packaging and the milk jug is a perfectly simple replacement for the existing polybottles."

The new packs will be sold initially at 21 branches - 17 in London, three in Wales and one in Bath - but will go nationwide if they are successful.

They will be more expensive than other milk, which retails for about 47p a pint for organic semi-skimmed milk or 90p for two pints. That equates to 72p a litre. Non-organic milk sells for 38p a pint, or 69p for two pints.

But whether the trend catches on remains to be seen. In Canada, eco-friendly plastic pouches have been in use for ten years and now account for 65 per cent of fresh milk sold.

But in Australia and New Zealand, similar bags failed to gain popularity when they were launched recently.

A spokesman for Recoup, the UK's household plastics recycling organisation, said the Waitrose project was a step in the right direction. "Anything that uses less material is good news," he said.

Asda has been piloting the use of a new, recycled cardboard milk bottle. A biodegradable bag inside the bottle ensures it does not go soggy.

But traditionalists maintain that the old glass milk bottle may yet prove to be the most environmentally friendly option. It can be reused up to 40 times before it needs to be recycled.