Life is full of little dilemmas, none of which on their own seem to feel that consequential, but as they accumulate, they start to gain more significance. Let me share with you just the latest of these little quandaries to travel down the garden path of the Georgeson household.

I suspect like many of you, I have happily sought to buy milk in a returnable, reuseable glass bottle, delivered to my doorstep, and I have done this for many years.

Imagine my dismay one sunny Saturday morning recently, to step out into the front garden to collect the milk, only to find it sitting there in a plastic, one-trip, one-pint container. Ok I think, the milkman must have run out of milk in glass today, and thought nothing of it. But when the same thing happened on Tuesday, and Thursday, and the following Saturday, I began to get suspicious.

So, the following Saturday, I watch out expectantly for ‘milkie’. And sure enough, there he is, plopping another plastic pint on my doorstep. And so, we have the inevitable conversation. He tells me he has discontinued milk in reuseable glass, because it is now too expensive and that the level of damage to milk on doorsteps, although small, is sufficient to make the business lossmaking because the margins are uncomfortably tight nowadays, when faced with the milk pricing policies of the major retailers.

I sympathise with him. But my despair is palpable. I don’t know what to do. He even offers to take my plastic bottles back and recycle them if it will make me feel better. There is no need for that, we have plastic recycling on our kerbside collection. But I am grateful for the offer. He knows he is losing one of the unique values of the milk delivery service that has stood us all in good stead in this country for so long – the value of reuse.

I want to keep using him because he provides a valuable community service and is a small business that should be nurtured and supported. But I don’t want to add more plastic into the waste – or recycling – stream than is absolutely necessary (even if that milk bottle has a lot more recycled content in it than it used to). My choice to minimise and reuse is being taken away from me.

The figures on the decline of milk delivery are staggering – in 1974, 94 per cent of milk was delivered to the doorstep, today it is less than 11 per cent. Maybe it is not possible to buck this relentless trend, but that doesn’t make it right. And no representative of the packaging or retail industries, or indeed government official, has ever satisfactorily explained to me why some retail chains, drinks and packaging providers, and governments, are capable of managing both deposit and non-deposit reuse systems in other countries in Europe and elsewhere, but the same companies say it is impossible and too expensive to do in the UK.

Some readers may accuse me of being old fashioned, and even nostalgic for a bygone age, and that I should just give up gracefully on the demise of the reuseable milk bottle and the valuable community service that went with it. And never mind trying to advocate a greater role for reuse deposit return systems to help with waste minimisation. If so, I plead guilty as charged.

It doesn’t help me with my little dilemma about the milkman and his plastic bottles. Perhaps you may have an answer for me, dear reader. If so, I would love to hear from you. Because, when the last of the community services disappears, along with the rural buses, post offices, schools and local shops, it will give us all something to think about in the long queue to get into the supermarket car park…