Dirty Milk Bottles About City Streets

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26853, 18 August 1948, Page 4

Dirty Milk Bottles About City Streets

Outside offices, shops, and manufacturing establishments in the city, collections of milk bottles are to be seen every morning and afternoon. Some of them are placed in doorways, on window sills, or alongside the wall of the building in the street. Some of the bottles are clean when they are set out for collection. In many cases, however, they have been in the offices* of consumers for some days before they are put out, and some are not even washed. The Daily Times saw just one such bottle yesterday. In contained some of

the milk which had originally been delivered in the bottle. It was sitting on a window sill in Crawford street outside Edinburgh House in mid-after-noon, and the dust of days had collected on it, presumably in the office in which the milk had been used by the office staff. It has been the experience of the Dunedin Metropolitan Milk Board that business premises are the worst offenders in returning dirty milk bottles to the milk treatment station. On one occasion it was found that oil had been put in a bottle, which had not been washed when it was returned by the consumer. Bottles such as the unwashed sample seen by the Daily Times present a problem to those using the sterilising machines at the city treatment station. The brown type has accentuated the difficulty of detecting foreign substances in the bottles. It is not inconceivable that a bottle as dirty as the one seen might well resist the best efforts of the sterilising process, and still be dirty when it is filled at the treatment station and delivered next day to a private house.