Milk crates are

square In Euclidean geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90-degree angles, π/2 radian angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a rectangle with two equal-length adj ...

rectangular In Euclidean geometry, Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is a quadrilateral with four right angles. It can also be defined as: an equiangular quadrilateral, since equiangular means that all of its angles are equal (360°/4 = 90°); or a par ...

interlocking

box A box (plural: boxes) is a container used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides. Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or very large (like a shipping box for furniture), and can ...

es that are used to transport

milk Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digestion, digest solid food. Immune factors and immune ...

and other products from

dairies A dairy is a business enterprise established for the harvesting or processing (or both) of animal milk – mostly from cows or buffaloes, but also from goats, sheep, horses, or camels – for human consumption. A dairy is typically located on a ...

retail Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

establishments. In English-speaking parts of Europe the term "

bottle crate A bottle crate or beverage crate is a container used for transport of beverage containers. In the present day they are usually made of plastic, but before the widespread use of plastic they tended to be made of wood or metal. Beverage crates be ...

" is more common but in the United States the term "milk crate" is applied even when the transported beverage is not milk.

History

The dimensions of the milk crate may have been influenced by the dimensions of the

tea chest A tea chest is a type of wooden case originally produced and used to ship tea to the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The conventional tea chest is a case with riveted metal edges, of approximate size . The term is now used more wid ...

. For all practical purposes, both hold similar internal volumes, but tea chests are designed for shipping over the open ocean. The bottle crate emerged after the tea chest was a de facto shipping method. The plastic milk crate is claimed as an Australian invention, produced through a period of trial and error in design by the Dairy Farmers Cooperative Milk Company in the 1950s and 60s.

Design

Middle 20th century bottle crates were made of wood, later ones were stainless steel, and those made in the latter part of the century were of heavy-duty

polyethylene Polyethylene or polythene (abbreviated PE; IUPAC name polyethene or poly(methylene)) is the most commonly produced plastic. It is a polymer, primarily used for packaging ( plastic bags, plastic films, geomembranes and containers including bo ...

. The most common milk crate sizes are designed to carry several milk jugs: Some milk crates have a height of , but this may vary.

Uses and recycling

Milk crates are often stolen for either personal or business use or for the plastic that they are made out of. Theft of milk crates can cost dairies millions of US dollars per year. This has led at least one dairy farm to hire a private investigator to discover what is happening to the crates; the results of investigations point to plastic re-sellers being the culprits in the majority of thefts.

Alternate shipping methods

In July 2008,

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

and some other stores introduced a

square milk jug The square milk jug is a variant of the plastic gallon (3.785 litres) container of milk commonly sold in the United States. The design was introduced in the summer of 2008 and is marketed as environmentally friendly because of the shape's advantage ...

that does not need to be transported in a crate. Sometimes called "green" milk jugs, they are not

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 Nanometre, nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by ...

in color, but rather are claimed to be

environmentally friendly Environment friendly processes, or environmental-friendly processes (also referred to as eco-friendly, nature-friendly, and green), are sustainability and marketing terms referring to goods and services, laws, guidelines and policies that clai ...

. These new milk jugs are stackable, and can be transported without crates. Companies need not buy plastic for the crates, nor transport or wash them."Cheaper, Stackable, "Green" Milk Jugs Cause a Stir"
. Jason Mick (Blog), July 1, 2008, DailyTech.com.

References

{{packaging Dairy farming

Shipping containers Articles containing video clips

History

Design

Uses and recycling

Alternate shipping methods

See also

References