Some students in the county could be drinking milk out of returnable bottles as early as January.
When the bottles, made of a durable material called LEXAN, will show up in schools depends on how long it takes Laesch Dairy of Bloomington to obtain and begin operating the new equipment necessary to fill and wash the bottles. Although the bottles should appear by September 1993, Laesch Dairy will begin distribution sooner if the equipment is up and running.
Mark Laesch, president of the dairy, learned last week that his firm had been awarded a $150,000 market development grant from the Illinois Department of Energy and Natural Resources.
”We`re not getting on the bandwagon (of returnable bottles), because we never got off,” he said. Since Laesch Dairy opened in 1907, the dairy has always offered returnable bottles, but never in half-pint sizes.
The company has distributors in Du Page and Kane Counties and will become the first dairy in Illinois to offer half-pint LEXAN bottles.
Jim Zimmermann, who distributes Laesch milk products in Du Page and in towns along the North Shore, said he intends to offer the bottles to his school customers as soon as they are available.
”I think the schools will want them because the students will want them,” he said.
The bottles can be used up to 100 times each. The initial cost of manufacturing the bottles is higher than the cost of paper cartons, but the cost per use is eventually lower because of the many times each bottle can be used.
In addition, the amount of space needed for disposal in landfills could decrease considerably, said Kay McKeen, coordinator of the School Recycling Assistance Program, a county-funded project of the Du Page Environmental Awareness Center.
To understand the impact, last year Arbor View School in Glen Ellyn, which has 376 pupils, measured the amount of milk cartons it used daily. The total was 5 cubic feet a day, totaling about 900 cubic feet a year.
The recycling assistance program estimates that the county`s 272 schools produce about 27,000 cubic yards of milk carton waste per year. McKeen said that because schools pay per cubic yard for garbage dumping, the annual cost to taxpayers is $88,400 for milk carton disposal.
