IT was a time when milk came in reusable containers delivered straight to the door and meat and veg was slipped into completely biodegradable packaging without a piece of plastic in sight.

Few shoppers would have thought to do the weekly shop without their own carrier bags and food waste was carted off to farms to be recycled into pigswill.

Clothes, too, were made to last and the make-do-and-mend spirit survived on in all those who could wield a darning needle or knit their way through winter.

Now, with milk deliveries making a comeback and supermarkets abandoning single-use plastic bags – and charging for their more substantial “bag for life” varieties – experts are saying people should look to the1970s to see how society made do before the rise of plastic and the throwaway culture of fast fashion.

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'Milkboys' deliver milk in Glasgow 

Today, 120,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste are produced from households in Scotland during a 12-month period. And most households throw away at least 40kg of the stuff each year, enough to melt down and make 10 wheelie bins.

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Despite the decades-old official urgings to recycle plastic waste, 20 million plastic bottles are littered in Scotland each year and more than 64,000 tonnes of plastic food packaging and bottles go in the bin and are destined for landfill, costing councils £11 million.

It is estimated that Britons bin clothes worth £12.5 billion each year as the rise of cheap, disposable fashion leads to 300,000 tonnes of textiles ending up in landfill.

Efforts have been made to curb the rising tide of plastic and and other waste, with bans on straws, cotton buds and throwaway disposable coffee cups. 

Scotland will also soon introduce a bottle deposit return scheme, where people will pay 20p on top of the price of a plastic bottle, and get it back when it’s returned.

But experts say that much of the problem could also be sidestepped if people adopted a lifestyle their parents and grandparents were familiar with, and stopped relying on plastic altogether.

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Packaging today

Michael Lenaghan, environmental policy advisor at Zero Waste Scotland, said: “A major change in the last 50 years has been a shift toward a resource intensive, throwaway culture with lots of short-life, single-use and linear products. 

“Think fast fashion, disposable cutlery, phones that we replace after a couple of years.

“This has made life a lot more convenient, but it has had calamitous impacts on the environment. In the 1970s, and indeed for nearly all of human history, people sought quality and long-life products, and took good care of them, repairing them when needed and cannibalising the material at end of life to use as they could. 

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“We can take inspiration from the past, and combine it with new technology and innovation to develop new, convenient ways to get the products and services we want, with far less environmental impact.  A smaller, more sustainable material footprint of the past, underpinned by a far more sustainable and carbon efficient energy system of today.”

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Billions of plastic bottles are sold worldwide

This would come at the cost of convenience, although perhaps not as much as people might assume.

Mr Lenaghan said: “The linear, single-use economic model is incredibly crude and blunt – it rose to prominence because our millennia-old methods for managing products and materials couldn’t cope with the complexity of a global economy.

“But in the digital, information age, these are no longer constraints – we can manage complex systems with ease – which means we can dust off and modernise timeless ideas like reuse, repair and long-life design.”

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Evidence that the tide may be turning comes as hundreds swap their plastic milk cartons for glass bottles as doorstep deliveries make a comeback.

He added: “Reusing our existing materials as often as possible is hugely beneficial for the planet and often makes sound business sense.

“By reducing what we consume, we also cut back on the volume of emissions associated with the production of new materials. There is also the benefit of alleviating the need to extract materials, which protects habitats and biodiversity.”