Refrigerator --> Curb
0 miles
Milton --> Avon
8 miles
Avon
Avon --> North Carolina
830 miles
North Carolina --> Leominster
810 miles
Leominster --> Nearby Store
55 miles
Nearby Store --> Milton
5 miles
Total Mileage
1708 miles
1708 milesSustainable Milton
When you put a milk jug out at the curb, it starts out on a long journey towards becoming a new widget made of plastic.
First, your milk jug is picked up by the Waste Management recycle truck here in Milton and trucked to their recycle plant in Avon.
In Avon it is sorted from other plastics, metals and glass, then crushed and bundled.
From Avon the bundles are trucked to a facility where the plastic is ground up, heated, melted and reformed into plastic pellets. One of these Waste Management facilities is in North Carolina.
From North Carolina, the pellets are sold to plastics manufacturers to be used to make new plastic products. Leominster is home to many US plastics extrusion and manufacturing companies.
After the extrusion process, the new plastic widget could be sold to a nearby store where you could go buy it. Now the plastic is back in Milton!
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Life Cycle of a Milk Jug
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Your milk jug traveled 1700 miles to get recycled into a new product. Some plastics travel even further. Since all those miles mean gasoline burned and CO2 emitted, we should all think about how to REDUCE our consumption, how to REUSE the packaging we have (local, returnable glass milk bottles?) and assure we RECYCLE every plastic, glass and metal item possible.
