History and Future of Tetra Pak  

The early morning clatter of...
The early morning clatter of milk bottles as the cheery British milkman goes on his rounds is now unfortunately a thing of the past. Robert Donat in the 39 Steps would have to borrow the uniform a cable TV installer to make his escape in todays Britain. On a serious note I'd be very interested to see whether a return to a universal delivery system would have benefits - weighing in the cost of production of bottles, delivery (electric milk floats strike me as being quite green), collection, cleaning (probably the most power hungry part of the process) filling etc against the use of tetrapak and disposable plastic bottles

In 1967 I did...
?a project with a school in the good city of Delft (NL)to compare the environmental effects of glass milk bottles versus the than new plastic bags. I never did it with Tetra-packs. They to were quite new at the time and most design students of my generation have struggled with designing crates or the likes for the original one liter tetrahedral packaging. Our study showed that the plastic bags would win hands down. Glass seems very recyclable, but we seem to forget that there is very little to gain because re-shaping it means heating the glass again to melting temperature. Just to use that energy (in the form of oil) would produce enough plastic to produce the 8 milk bags that you replace. I do not know if that has changed but at the time a milk bottle would only circulate eight times before being taken out of circulation by breakage or so much surface damage that it would not be considered saleable anymore.
Tetra packs are made of a rather complex lamination and I know Tetra has made quite an effort to re-cycle it but unless I am not well informed it is not re-cycled it is down cycled.
Any Swedes out there that could inform us better??

My grandmother still had milk...
My grandmother still had milk and orange juice delivered up until fairly recently I think, just outside of Birmingham, it was a big help to her.
So I wonder there must be situations where something might not be a good use of resources but has social benefit that is worth the cost?
Its a small thing but with suburban living the sense of being alienated from your neighbours (so close but so far!) can be pretty profound so a common experience might be worth it?
But then again I'm sure other people have noticed that wer're spoilt for choice, people would find just having plain old milk delivered a bit stifling. Standing in the supermarket you have to look through 17 different varities of low fat goats milk just to find unadulterated udder squeezings.

Sad post-script
A curious and distressing post-script to the Tetra-Pak story:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1028059.ece