Cut the wrap! UK dairy farm aims to be first to go single-use plastic-free

Staff at Mossgiel farm hope to promote a more sustainable model of dairy farming, including delivering milk in reusable glass bottles

Lying in a field of grass among his herd of dairy cows, Ayrshire farmer Bryce Cunningham picks up and pretends to throw away a plastic carton of milk. This is what we want to get rid of on our farm, he says in a promotional video, as he explains his quest to become the UK's first single-use plastic-free milk producer.

After raising more than 10,000 from a crowdfunding campaign, he's managed to replace single-use plastic cartons with 32,000 glass bottles adorned with the face of Robert Burns - who's said to have once worked on the farmland - which he is able to wash and reuse.

There are, of course, other farms selling milk in glass bottles, but Bryce is now also eliminating single-use plastics from feed, chemicals and other inputs bought onto the farm, as well as finding alternatives to plastic silage wraps used to store fodder for feeding the cows over the winter.

As well as buying glass bottles, he refurbished a milk bottling machine dating back to the 1960s from a local dairy farm that had been left unused after the owner had left dairying.

The milk from Bryce's 55-cow herd, along with milk from two other organic farms that supply him, goes out to around 8-10,000 people in glass bottles across Scotland.