I spent 3 months in an economy built around milk bags (Uruguay) and when you come from a tetrapak/carton or bottle economy, it's deeply confusing.
"What's this stupid oval plastic jug for?" (Throws it back in cupboard) - a week later people are laughing at me failing either to pour from floppy milk sacs or understand their hilarity.
(if you've never seen one, its typically a perforated, lightweight rigid former, which holds the sac. The idea is that when you snip one corner of the sac of milk, it naturally forms a spout, and this shape is just to hold the bag rigidly so you can grasp it to pour, without milk spurting everywhere as the bag looses rigidity. Without knowing what it is, it looks like a bizarre local colander or childs toy of no clear purpose or utility. And, they don't necessarily live in the chiller cabinet with the milk, so "how do you know")
It didn't help the rental flat had no sink plug. Dictionary "tapon" was met with hilarity by every check out counter lady I spoke to.. "plug" having many colloquial meanings. I made one out of a rubber sanding disk fitting for the sink, nothing else over the counter fitted.
Milk and yoghurt and cream. All flow production well suited to this bagging (heat sealed top and bottom, filling a tube off a roll. Interesting Q: how do you get the milk into this tube?)
My elementary school was one of those that switched to the bagged milk in the 90s. It was a pretty radical change, warranting a puppet show to ease us into this eco-friendly future. I doubt I'll ever forget they (the puppets) only gave it one thumb up, since the other thumb had to cover the straw hole when you plunge it into the milk bag. We were, uh, more enthusiastic and regularly gave two thumbs up.
When I was a young kid, I was obsessed with Japan. Well, I suppose I'm still a weeb to this day. But my point is, I would have had a conniption fit if bag milk showed up in my cafeteria lunch lol.
I wonder if there's some cultural reason for liquids in bags to be considered an unusual packaging method in Western countries, so much that milk and related products seem to be their only relatively widespread use (and even then, uncommon enough that it warrants a Wikipedia page), but it seems a common practice in Asia for other drinks too. Then again, it is common in the US for small portions of sauce e.g. ketchup to be in packets, which are essentially a scaled-down version of this.
As an American, it blew my mind to see people in Taiwan carrying around plastic bags of hot soup. It makes perfect sense from a physics standpoint, and the convenience of it was obvious, so my mind was only blown momentarily – but it was just so unexpected. I think that's the answer to your question: the grocery stores could switch packaging any time they wanted to, but they don't want to weird people out.
If you replace "Western" with USA your statement is more accurate. Bag of milk can be found in western countries like Canada, Irreal, and generally in continental Europe.
I think the point is that even in Canada, etc, it is still only the milk that is bagged. Not other things like orange juice. But I’ve never been to Canada so I dunno
Just speculating about orange juice: vitamin C degrades easily when exposed to light, so that orange juice in clear containers lose more vitamin C than orange juice in opaque containers. That could be one reason against (clear) milk bags, but there are certainly clear bottles of orange juice sold, and I suppose you could use opaque juice bags, though those would be less user friendly than clear juice bags.
Orange juice is nearly always sold in a clear jug in the US, and that which I can remember in Canada. In fact I don't think I have ever encountered an opaque jug of juice, only paper cartons.
Also, Caprisun pouches have foil backing that cause them to somewhat maintain shape, and a design that gives them a base to stand upright. Canadian bagged milk, at least what kind I encountered when I was there, had neither of these traits.
While only 5 of Canada's 9 provinces have bagged milk today (Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia), in the late 1960's when it was introduced, all provinces had it. Four provinces dropped it between the 1970's and 1990's.
Of the 5 provinces that still have bagged milk, Ontario and Quebec constitute over half of the Canadian population, so I don't think it is correct to say it's "not very common in Canada" when 26 million of the 40 million Canadians have access to bagged milk.
Milk often comes in (large) bag form for cafeteria/restaurant style milk dispensers in the US, at least in the ones I've seen. Though I think those usually have a specific port on the bag that the dispenser pierces to get to it -- it's not _just_ a bag like those shown on that wikipedia page.
Interestingly they seem to be a lot less prominent in grocery stores than I remember the past few years I’ve visited Toronto. Carton milk seems to have gained popularity/prominence on store shelves.
Why is your milk so expensive compared to the USA? After an extended price hike due to the volatility of core consumer goods inflation, a 3.78L US gallon of milk is now back to sub-4 USD.
> The dairy sector is different because since the 1970s it has been subject to supply management. Basically, it’s a government-sanctioned cartel: The Canadian Dairy Commission dictates the precise amount of milk produced every month in the country and uses this top-down control to keep dairy prices artificially high. Similar systems are also in place for chicken, turkey and eggs.
> The Canadian dairy sector can do this without fear of international competition because foreign imports are subjected to prohibitive tariffs of up to 300 per cent; this is why border guards will often explicitly ask you if you have any cheese in your luggage (and why the police keep busting cheese-smuggling rings).
Its a cartel. But, honestly, the quality of Canadian diary is one of the few things Canada has going for it. I remember first tasting sour cream in the US - yuck. I thought Id accidentally bought the light versions.
(In cheese the US regains the advantage though - Quebec cheese is decent , but doesn't hold a candle to European cheeses that are available in US grocery stores for much lower prices)
Also like… what sort of dairy industry would we have otherwise?
The US is right next door to… everywhere here. Anything we can do, they can _probably_ do cheaper. Do we want access to basic staples to be at the whim of US policy and production?
I know we’re basically joined at the hip anyway (our economy is basically as a cheaper source of manufacturing and services for the US… and resource extraction for the US), but if we want to keep up the idea of being a separate nation it’s probably good we can at least provide basic staples for our own populace.
Milk bags make environmental sense. Sure the plastic may or may not be recyclable, but the bags are so much lighter than glass, and a little lighter than cardboard, as well as being more efficient with space -- it's saves on transportation CO2 in so many ways.
As well, unlike Tetrapak, empty bags don't have to be cut up or compressed. They just naturally take up so little space.
There is also less plastic in milk bags than plastic jugs. Cartons also have plastic on both the inside and outside to make them waterproof. I think the cartons have less plastic than the bags but it is harder to recycle either the cardboard or the plastic because they are fused together.
I'm pretty sure they have paper carton / plastic jug ones in BC. Oh I miss these... It is practically impossible to keep the milk fresh after the bag is opened.
For us it does, though, it was always a problem for me when I lived in Canada. Here in the EU my UHT milk can stay open in my fridge for several weeks and still be good.
I also prefer the taste compared to pasteurizer milk, since that point will inevitably be brought up by people who always find the milk they are used to to be the only good milk that exists. I prefer UHT because it tastes closer to raw milk.
Well, 1 glass = 250ml, so 1L is 4 glasses. That's really not a lot.
Milk in bags probably last more than a week (the opening is very small so there's not a lot of air that gets in), but I've never not finished milk in under a week so I can't say.
I've never met anyone who drinks 250 mL glasses of milk, though. I put maybe about 10 mL in my coffee once a day, and need 500 mL or 750 mL when baking crêpes. Sometimes in cereals but that's not very often.
A long time ago I was at a student party in France, and somebody brought in a 4L floppy plastic bag of the cheapest wine possible. It was just as unwieldy as it sounds, and the wine inside was terrible, so I never saw one again and even most French people I've related this anecdote to have never seen or heard of one.
Then a clever Australian invented boxed wine, which hides the plastic bag in a cardboard box with a little spout, and now wine in a bag is commonplace and almost (but not quite) respectable.
I once met the son of one of Chile's largest wine producers. He had recently set up his own wine export business. When he mentioned he was also selling cask wine (i.e. wine in a cardboard box with a plastic bladder), I assumed this was cheap, inexpensive wine. He told me that he sold some of his better wines this way because a lot of European hospitality businesses preferred it. Makes sense when you consider that it will keep much better than bottled wine once 'opened'.
One advantage of those (unlike the milk bags) is that they don't let in very much air. The bag just deflates as you pour/draw. The much reduced exposure to air is great for those (not me) that drink their wine over days/weeks.
Also handy for camping trips or "no-glass" environments (e.g. boats)
> It's handy for people who want to drink 1-2 glasses of wine a day
In college one year, I had a randomly-assigned roommate who occasionally celebrated "boxed wine night", during which he would attempt to drink an entire box over the course of the night.
This is how I learned that boxed wine is apparently also handy for people who like to drink absurd amounts of cheap wine, since each box is typically equivalent to 4 bottles.
You can probably guess how "boxed wine night" usually ended for him. Even so, his academic grades were excellent, go figure.
The smartest person I know would drink an entire bottle of vodka in an evening when he was a freshman.
He quickly stopped that behavior, though. (I think I told him he made a fool of himself and he didn't need to do that to impress people.)
I personally never had the stomach for that much alcohol. I once drank a single bottle of wine (4-5 glasses) in an evening and I could hardly handle it.
That somebody had simply taken the bag from the cardboard box it was sold in, for some reason (maybe space).
These are called cubi in France (from cubitainer) and used to be hard plastic containers but have been bags in cardboard boxes for maybe the last 30 years or so.
They have a reputation for being used for the cheapest wine possible (which was likely the case if you were students) but can also be used for better wine, it's actually a rather good storage device as it still excludes oxygen once open unlike regular bottles.
The only time I would buy box wine, in my younger days, was when going to a music festival. Usually Glastonbury where the camping and fun starts a full two days before the festival proper.
The reason for the box wine? When you've finished it you can inflate the bag to use as a camping pillow.
When I was a college student they started selling small tetrapaks of wine that made them look like protein shakes. I would play catch with them after drinking some of it, and I can only imagine how much more fun that would be with a bag. I would have loved to have seen the explosion.
Also, I can't help but feel like storing wine in a floppy bag is our natural way of things. After all, we used to store it in animal skins.
You can get it at US grocery stores and some of it is competitive on quality with other wines in the same or slightly higher price ranges. It's fairly popular for family dinners, e.g. when there aren't guests over but Mom and Dad want a glass.
Thats not the point. I would not even considering buying it in a bottle. So thats a loss for the company that makes that choice.
Plastics also tend to leech into your liquids, for your information, especially over long periods of time, which is very relevant for wine but not as much for your soda
The point is that you probably wouldn't tell it from bottled wines of other brands, that's basically superstition, as is the belief that metallized PET can leach anything into your booze in non-homeopathic quantities.
In elementary school in Wisconsin in the 70s, we lost our milk cartons in favor of the bagged milk.
Although it may have been sold as eco-friendly, the real driving reason was cost reduction: it was less expensive to package and transport milk in plastic bags than in small waxed cardboard cartons.
I grew up with bagged milk in rural New Zealand. There is an art to getting the perfect corner cut so the milk would pour correctly (flow-rate was a commonly debated preference). We even used little milk bag corner slicers to help get a good cut. Fond memories.
The most disapointing thing about milk bags is the lack of milk bag holder pitcher variety. One would think there would be an entire market for this kind of wares, but it's mostly a few uninspired generic plastic designs you can buy for 2 bucks. I think I saw 1 handsome stainless steel one in my lifetime and after seeing all the overpriced ($30-50) products availble, I'm pretty sure that pitcher was fabricated by someone who also hates state of milk pitcher consumer products.
Seems obvious that the reason bagged liquids are less common is because it's awkward as hell to hold and carry, especially at larger sizes?
Even with some kind of handle, a soft, floppy bag is less ergonomic to carry than a hard-sided container with a molded handle. The only use case for a soft-sided liquid container that makes design sense are the flasks that fit inside a running vest and therefore flex to the shape of your chest along with the vest material.
In Canada families have a pitcher that's the right shape and size for the milk bags that are sold, and is reused. You just snip the corner off the bag. That said, the milk is double bagged (several smaller bags of milk in a larger bag, 1L each maybe?), so there is still a fair bit of plastic involved. The time I was visiting my friend in Canada one of the bags that he brought home busted. Not exactly fun
The outer bag contains three 1.333 litre pouches of milk for a total of four litres per bag.
You definitely want to check that no milk has leaked from the pouches into the outer bag before purchasing. They are fairly robust though. They can withstand a fair bit of mishandling but sharp objects are their worst enemy.
Not important! But saw this a lot at coffee shops in Barcelona on a recent trip and it surprised me. Also thought it was funny that everyone kept their milk bags inside a plastic open-topped pitcher for easy pouring...
I grew up with those. In Germany we have cartons instead. That's already a lot less plastic used, it's recyclable, and the small 1 litre format is perfect if you only use milk for tea.
I wouldn't be so sure about plastic, cartons have plastic lining and caps. From ecological standpoint bags seem to make much more sense because they use fewer resources (just a bit of oil for plastic, no cutting of trees required), it's just a single material that can be cleanly burned afterwards and it's very efficient to transport, no space wasted for air.
Milk bags are better for the environment than cartons or jugs, even if you landfill the bags and recycle the cartons and jugs.
Bags have less plastic than jugs (thinner, softer) and cartons are difficult (eg. expensive and resource intensive) to recycle because the inner and outer layers of plastic are difficult to separate from the cardboard.
Do they? Tetrapak is "14% plastic sheets, 5% aluminium, 6% from a bio-plastic cap and 75% cardboard". Putting things in yellow bin doesn't mean that they won't be incinerated, majority of plastics either gets burned or ends up in landfills.
I just moved back to Canada from the UK. In the UK we got our milk from a local dairy in glass bottles with a wee foil tab on the mouth. Occasionally the magpies would get to it before we did, and we had a couple bottles go bad in a heat wave, but generally it worked great. Now I’m back to buying bags of milk within bags, and the amount of waste is shocking. Can’t recycle it where I am.
While milk bags are not as environmentally friendly as glass, glass is very heavy and expensive to transport and requires a fair bit of energy to wash and sterilize for reuse.
Compared to cardboard cartons (which are lined with plastic to make it waterproof) and plastic jugs, milk bags are more environmentally friendly even if you put the bags in a landfill and recycle or reuse the cartons and/or jugs.
That said, even if milk bags are not recycled, you can reuse them. Many Canadians cut one of the short ends and rinse them out to make a freezer bag or a lunch bag which can be reused multiple times. Some people use them to hold nails or screws.
Maybe at the consumer level, but in Canada they're delivered in re-usable totes from the manufacturer. They're great totes for many things... I think I've said too much...
But maybe not at the consumer level: a small amount of plastic film that isn't recycled may be less wasteful than a much larger amount of plastic that is (sometimes) melted down and recycled. Even the cardboard cartons (non-Tetra) are a mix of plastic and paper so they're not recyclable everywhere.
What I'd like to know is: What's the break-even point? How many times can a #2 milk jug be recycled versus the amount of plastic used for the same number of milk bags?
PET(E) and HDPE are both extremely recyclable (not in the infinitely recyclable approach but in the “have lots of long second lives” approach), though something like only 30% of HDPE ends up getting collected for recycling in the first place.
It feels like we need to go back to where we were (in the UK anyway) when I was growing up - milk delivered in glass bottles which then get collected and sterilised for re-use and/or recycled into more glass.
The old-fashioned milkman was even way ahead of the crowd in terms of fuel use, they had low-speed electric vehicles dating back as far as the 1930s (if I'm reading the wikipedia article right). Environmentally friendly all round, though labour-inefficient I guess. And as much as any cow-related product can be environmentally friendly...
There's a couple of brands of glass bottled milk in my region of the US. There's a deposit at the grocery store and then you gotta talk every cashier through the whole concept when you try to cover it with an old bottle.
That sounds a little annoying! But in general it sounds like a decent scheme.
People are slowly getting trained to take their own bags to grocery stores/supermarkets here in Aus and in the UK, as the old single-use plastic shopping bags have been outlawed and they charge for paper or good quality re-usables. (Is that happening in the US?)
I'm not sure if I could see it taking off for containers in general, but maybe for milk it could.
But plastic bags use minuscule amounts of plastic, and are not single-use by a long shot - I use them for waste-paper bins bags, planters, dividers inside larger bags, etc, etc.
The most egregious plastic polluters are the cosmetics and detergent companies. Those would really make sense in bags; no worries about plastic in your diet, etc, and eg those shampoo bottles, especially the ones with pump dispensers, are an outrageous orgy of waste.
Not really an argument I was looking to get into today, the fact is that they are being restricted in multiple countries (the UK has introduced a 10p per bag charge rather than a ban, that appears to have achieved a 75-80% reduction), and because of the restrictions behaviour is changing, which may pave the way for other behaviour changes like the reuse of glass.
Both the UK and Australia are taking action on microplastics as well, though both have a way to go. Australia has an overall plastics plan that aims to address a lot of single-use plastic problems, including takeaway containers, the packaging you mention etc etc.
Two stores sell glass milk (same milk) like that around here. One would just not charge the deposit if you gave them a bottle (the Ace hardware, natch) - the other had a complicated refund process involving the customer service desk, quite a hassle.
It is still part of the country of Canada. My point was saying Canada uses bags of milk is no different than saying Americans do X when its only Florida or a handful of states.
Five of the nine Canadian provinces have bagged milk. In the 1960's when bagged milk was introduced, all nine provinces had it. The Western provinces dropped it from the 70's to the 90's.
Today, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia all have bagged milk. Between them is 26 million of the 40 million Canadians, so the majority, 65%, of Canadians have access to bagged milk.
It would be more accurate to portray Western Canada as "only Florida or a handful of states".
"What's this stupid oval plastic jug for?" (Throws it back in cupboard) - a week later people are laughing at me failing either to pour from floppy milk sacs or understand their hilarity.
(if you've never seen one, its typically a perforated, lightweight rigid former, which holds the sac. The idea is that when you snip one corner of the sac of milk, it naturally forms a spout, and this shape is just to hold the bag rigidly so you can grasp it to pour, without milk spurting everywhere as the bag looses rigidity. Without knowing what it is, it looks like a bizarre local colander or childs toy of no clear purpose or utility. And, they don't necessarily live in the chiller cabinet with the milk, so "how do you know")
It didn't help the rental flat had no sink plug. Dictionary "tapon" was met with hilarity by every check out counter lady I spoke to.. "plug" having many colloquial meanings. I made one out of a rubber sanding disk fitting for the sink, nothing else over the counter fitted.
Milk and yoghurt and cream. All flow production well suited to this bagging (heat sealed top and bottom, filling a tube off a roll. Interesting Q: how do you get the milk into this tube?)