"How clean should my return milk bottles be?"

As clean as you can get them! Focus your attention on the milk in the bottom of the bottle. The dried milk line around the bottom of the inside of your containers is very hard to remove even with our industrial bottle washer. Promptly rinsing your empty bottle with warm water will easily remove this build up if done as soon as your container is empty. Please spend a minute to rinse your container thoroughly as soon as it is empty, it will save us a great deal of water, detergent, and electricity. Dried milk residue in/on your return bottle means we use double the resources to wash and sanitize it compared to if you return your bottle clean.

Lastly there is a real, live human being named Derrick who spends his entire week faithfully processing and washing your returned containers. He has to scrub, and soak, and many times scrub again each nasty bottle before it goes into our commercial bottle washer. When you return your bottle without any old milk residue, you make Derrick smile.

A good method we have found for rinsing empty milk bottles:

1. As soon as your bottle is empty, promptly rinse all milk residue out with warm water. It usually takes a couple rinses to get all the residue out. If you do this immediately, feel free to skip the next steps as this will get everything out of the bottom of the bottle. However, if it sat for a little bit before rinsing, (which we get it, life happens) proceed to step 2 and 3.

2. Next, add a drop of soap with warm water, shake your bottle a few times, then rinse out the soapy water. This bottle brush is our go to at the farm. You may consider getting one if you find you regularly can’t get the residue out of the botom of your bottles. Make sure to check for milk residue in the bottom of the container and on the outside directly below the cap. Please note, we absolutely do wash and sanitize them again directly before filing again.

3. If you find an empty bottle that has sat for a while with dried milk in it, have no fear! Simply fill your crusty milk bottle with warm water and let it soak overnight, and then follow the above rinsing procedure. A scrub with a bottle brush really helps.

If you don’t have time to rinse it just fill it with water and take care of it later. The important thing is that the milk residue not dry out.

"Should I return the white plastic milk bottle lids?"

You can either recycle them or leave them on your bottle, and we will recycle them.