The crate comes back, or none of this works.
Deposits, return rates and the sixty per cent of two thousand glass milk bottles we never saw again. Returnable packaging is an arithmetic problem dressed as an environmental one.
What the milk bottles cost us.
Wychwood Dairy went into the shop in glass in 2021 with a forty-pence deposit and a return bin behind the tills.
Of the first two thousand bottles, roughly eight hundred came back. The rest are in sheds and greenhouses across west Oxfordshire, which is not a bad fate for a bottle but is a catastrophic one for a deposit scheme. At about ninety pence a bottle landed, that was a little over a thousand pounds of glass, and the dairy carried most of it.
Two things were wrong. Forty pence is not enough money to make anybody drive back, and a bin behind the tills is invisible to somebody carrying a basket. Both were our decisions.
- Bottles out
- 2,000
- Bottles back
- ~800
- Return rate
- 40%
- Cost
- ~£1,050
What actually moves a return rate.
| Change | Effect on return rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit at 40p | ~40% | Where we started |
| Deposit at £1.50 | 68–75% | The single biggest lever, by a distance |
| Return point visible from the door | +8 points | Not behind the tills |
| Return accepted without a receipt | +6 points | Arguing about receipts loses more than it saves |
| Return accepted at the pub as well | +9 points | Two return points beat one, disproportionately |
| A crate rather than a bottle | +20 points or more | People return a crate. They keep a nice bottle |
| Reminder email at day ten | +3 points | Small, cheap, slightly annoying |
| Deposit refunded as credit, not cash | −4 points | People read it as a voucher, which it is |
Why the crate is the unit, not the container.
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A nice bottle is a gift you have accidentally given away.
The better the packaging looks, the less of it comes back. A plain returnable crate is ugly enough that nobody wants it in a kitchen and sturdy enough to survive forty round trips, which is exactly the right combination.
Every scheme that has put its deposit on a beautiful embossed bottle has funded a large amount of very attractive storage across the county.
Design the container to be wanted and you have designed a one-way trip.
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And a crate carries the whole order.
One deposit, one return, one transaction. A customer returning eleven separate items is doing admin. A customer handing back a crate is doing nothing.
It also means the deposit can be large enough to matter — six pounds on a crate is meaningful and unobjectionable, where six pounds on a jar is absurd.
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The economics only work above about thirty trips.
A crate costs eleven pounds and survives roughly forty trips if it is not run over. Against cardboard at about one pound forty a box, break-even is somewhere between eight and twelve round trips, and everything after that is saving.
Which means the whole scheme lives or dies on return rate, not on the environmental argument. At a forty per cent return rate a returnable crate is worse than cardboard, environmentally and commercially, and anybody running one at that rate should stop.
Below seventy per cent, returnable packaging is worse than cardboard. That is the entire brief.
The scheme, specified.
The crate
- Deposit
- £6.00Refunded in full, in cash or to the card
- Cost to us
- £11.00 landedInjection-moulded, stackable, nestable empty
- Expected trips
- ~40Before it is retired to the yard
- Break-even
- 8–12 tripsAgainst cardboard at £1.40 a box
- Target return rate
- 75%Below 70% the scheme is worse than cardboard
Where it comes back
- The farm shop
- Any opening hourAt the door, not behind the tills
- The pub
- Any opening hourWhich added nine points on its own
- Collection lockers
- Nine points, listedThe locker takes a crate as well as giving one
- By courier
- Prepaid labelCosts us more than the deposit. Offered anyway
What is inside it
- Chilled liner
- Wool, returnableFrom the wool mill, and it comes back in the crate
- Void fill
- Paper, recyclableNot polystyrene, ever
- Glass
- Returnable separatelyWhich the milk taught us to charge properly for
- Plastic
- None in the boxExcept the crate itself, which is the point
Nothing on this site takes payment. Trade ordering, applications and audits described here are demonstrations of how the process would run, not live systems, and no card or bank details are collected anywhere.
Returnable packaging, at a glance.
£6 deposit
Large enough to bring somebody back.
Three return routes
Shop, pub and nine lockers.
75% target
Below 70% we would stop.
No polystyrene
Anywhere, at any point.
Where the crates live.
Nine collection points at taprooms and partner pubs.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Public filings, published rankings and press reporting, each labelled on the page as a verified record, a founder claim or a third-party estimate.
The words are ours. The brands are not, and nothing here is licensed.
