A supermarket has issued an important message to customers who buy milk from their stores. Co-op is hoping the new message will prevent waste as well as help households during the cost of living crisis.
The retailer is adding a new label to their own-brand milk products telling customers to freeze the milk. It comes after data revealed more than £150 million of milk is wasted every year.
Lancs Live reports 90% of that waste comes from households. Another survey has shown UK homes throw away almost 100 billion plastic items each year.
The Big Plastic Count saw nearly 100,000 households across the country count every piece of disposable packaging they used over the course of a week in May. Participating homes, representing around a quarter of a million people, threw away an average of 66 pieces of packaging every week – 83% of which was food and drinks packaging.
The Co-op hopes encouraging customers to store their milk in the freezer will help cut down on the 70,000 tonnes of milk wasted annually, the M.E.N reports.
The new on-pack message from Co-op will read: “Don’t waste me, freeze me, in a suitable, clean container, then defrost in the fridge, use within 24 hours.” The new messaging will appear across all Co-op own brand milk products from September 2022.
According to the Co-op, two-thirds of UK adults don’t freeze milk at home, and 31 per cent didn’t know you even could. Of those unaware that milk could be frozen, 34 per cent of them said they’d now start putting their milk in the freezer.
Milk is best within one month of freezing and for larger bottles it’s best to decant them into a container. When it’s ready to be used, you can defrost it in the fridge to thaw fully and then use the defrosted milk within 24 hours.
Catherine Dishington, environment and sustainability manager at Co-op, said: “We’re committed to reducing our impact on the planet and we’re trying to help our customers and members make small changes that collectively, can make an impact.
“Freezing food is one of the easiest ways to make the most out of your weekly shop and prevent food wastage but not everyone knows that it’s perfectly safe to freeze milk. We hope that by having this message on pack it will not only save customers some money, it should also help them to throw away less.”
