Glass milk bottle dairy to close

Dairy Crest said it has entered into consultation with staff to close its glass bottling dairy in Aintree, Merseyside.

The move would leave the company’s Hanworth dairy in London as its only glass-bottle site.

The announcement comes as the familiar chinking sound of the milkman making his morning rounds grows ever rarer.

Around 2 million glass milk bottles are currently delivered to people’s doorsteps every day across the UK. This is down from around 40 million in the early 1990s.

Dairy Crest said that there has been a fall in sales of milk in glass bottles as “residential sales continue to decline and households increasingly opt for plastic bottles and milk bags”.

The company, which accounts for around 1 million of the glass bottles delivered every day, said that customers in the north of England who still want to receive their milk in glass bottles will be supplied from the Hanworth diary.

A spokesman for Dairy Crest said that given the decline in glass bottle usage, “operating glass bottles out of one site is the right thing to do”. He said that delivery to doorsteps in plastic polybottles, which are more environmentally-friendly, is growing.

Milk consumption among Britons is on the up.

In the year to February 19 2012 sales volumes of liquid milk increased by 2 per cent to 5.2 billion litres, according to Kantar Worldpanel.

However over the same period, the volume of deliveries to doorsteps fell by a fifth, Kantar said. Sales through supermarkets and other shops grew by 3 per cent.