It’s Oktoberfest! You know, that German holiday about beer and lederhosen?

No. As many Germans will tell you it’s not a German thing as much as it is a Bavarian thing. It’s like saying kilts are a British thing (it’s a Scottish thing). Or that milk in bags is a Canadian thing (in Canada it’s an Eastern Canada thing).

In researching what the heck I was talking about when I was making this comparison at a recent team meeting, Alessio found a lovely study on the efficiency of milk bags as milk packaging in Ontario published by The Environment and Plastics Industry Council in 1997.

I highly recommend you skim it for its graphs and the study conclusions. The best parts for me are how it highlights that the consumption of milk (by volume) increased 22% from 1968 to 1995 while at the same time the amount (by mass) of solid waste produced by milk packaging decreased by almost 20%.

I also liked Table 8 which showed the recycling rates of the various packaging types that we’d need to reach in order to match the small amount (by mass) of solid waste generation of the (100% unrecycled) milk bags. (Interestingly, in my region you can recycle milk bags if you first rinse and dry them).

I guess what I’m trying to say about this is three-fold:

1. Don’t assume regional characteristics are national in your distributed team. Berliners might not look forward to Oktoberfest the way M"unchner do, and it’s possible no one in the Vancouver office owns a milk jug or bag cutter.
2. Milk Bags are kinda neat, and now I feel a little proud about living in a part of the world where they’re common. I’d be a little more confident about this if the data wasn’t presented by the plastics industry, but I’ll take what I can get (and I’ll start recycling my milk bags).
3. Geez, my team can find data for _any topic_. What differences we have by being distributed around the world are eclipsed by how we’re universally a bunch of nerds.

:chutten

 

https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/distributed-teams-regional-peculiarities-like-oktoberfest-and-bagged-milk/