Filed under: sustainability
The gentle whine of the electric milk float is a sound I remember vividly from my childhood slumbers. This quiet and efficient vehicle delivered our daily milk early each morning. In many parts of the UK they also delivered bread, fruit-juice and other perishables.
The beauty of an electric milk float is that it can charge each night when not doing the rounds and the electric motor is very efficient for the stop-start of a delivery round. Also, by delivering early they can be fairly sure that people are in to pick up their produce.
I think a Transition Town project somewhere should (if they haven’t already) start up a ‘local food float’ initiative and get a fleet of floats back on the road. Perhaps the ‘local food float’ could load up at a central distribution point where local producers bring their produce for distribution the evening before. This would save vegetable box schemes some of their distribution costs. Farming Today recently ran some programmes on how rising fuel costs are hitting local producers just as hard as the supermarkets. Conventional sustainability wisdom says that local producers will benefit as fuel costs rise as they can finally out compete the supermarkets on something - however most ‘local’ producers still rely on oil based distribution to get their produce out to the consumers - or for the consumers to drive to their farm.
Some great info on milk floats at milkfloats.org.uk.
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We’re pretty lucky here in Oxford that we get milk delivered to our door by milkfloat (I occasionally hear it at about 3am). Due to demand, we even get organic milk in bottles (a couple of years ago they would only do organic milk in cartons).
But for the most amazing life-after-milk transformation, check out the incredible Earth Rover One - we were at a festival a few weeks ago and were amazed at his huge range of renewable energy generation techniques on display - and of course he used them to fill up his batteries to drive there and back at a sedate and civilised 10 miles per hour!
Comment by Simon B 06.19.08 @ 7:56 pm