Ninety-six-year-old milk crate inventor Geoff Milton seemed playfully scandalised when I asked him if he uses one to store his records.
“Ohh what a suggestion!” he exclaimed from his nursing home in Glenhaven, New South Wales.
“That’s one thing I have been very careful about in my own life – I have not illegally used a milk crate, it's just one of those personal things. I designed it for one reason and that’s what it’s gonna be used for. What other people do with it is not my business now,” he said.
And they’ve been used for anything from bike baskets to bed frames.
But if you’ve stolen one for those purposes, well that’s technically a crime [because it’s theft and stealing is against the law].
Like the Hill Hoist, the milk crate is an iconic Australian invention. It was designed by Geoffrey Milton. Source: The Feed/ Pat Forrest
Have people actually been fined or charged?
Yes. In Australia, one Queensland man was fined more than $1500 for stealing 150 crates for makeshift furniture in 2015.
Overseas, a Florida man spent a night behind bars in 2016 for illegally using a milk crate and was charged with possessing stolen property.
The crimes get more serious though.
In the US, the theft of milk crates in the US has risen and fallen with the price of oil. That’s because the crates are made of petroleum-derived plastic. So when oil is more expensive, crates are more expensive, and therefore more attractive to steal and sell.
One organised crime racket in Baltimore allegedly made nearly half a million dollars in seven months.
When oil is more expensive, crates are more expensive. Source: The Feed/ Pat Forrest
Does it cost the dairy industry?
It has cost the Australian dairy industry millions. In 2007, Dairy Farmers estimated a million crates a year were lost, misused or damaged. At around $4 per crate, that’s up to $4 million annually. Some estimates say in turn it was costing farms up to $5,000 per year.
Back then, if there was a cost to a dairy cooperative, like buy more crates...
“It meant farmers were taking a lower price because farmers owned those [cooperatives],” said the former CEO of Australian Dairy Farmers John McQueen.
But nowadays, farmers don’t own them anymore. Most of Australia’s milk is being processed by overseas companies. So John McQueen says the cost is probably falling more to you.
“The cost of replacing the numbers that are stolen each year is almost certainly going to nothing but the consumer price,” he said.
But he says farmers have had to deal with much more economically critical issues than milk crate theft; like drought, floods and the sale of those cooperatives.
You might think you're recycling but taking a milk crate for your own use is illegal. Source: The Feed/ Pat Forrest
“Doesn’t demean the importance of trying to minimise the cost from milk crates being stolen,” John McQueen said.
Why was the milk crate actually designed?
In 2019, bystanders used one to arrest a deadly knifeman in Sydney’s CBD.
“I didn’t build it for that purpose of course,” inventor Geoff Milton said.
“And let's be clear, I didn’t build it. The idea was mine but you don’t do these things on your own, there was a very, very good team.”
Geoff was an engineer at Dairy Farmers in the late 1950s.
“It was about 1959…and the weak link in the mechanical chain was the wire crates.”
He says when the wire bent and broke, it smashed the glass bottles, stopping the entire production line. It was Geoff’s idea to use plastic instead.
“I was merely an engineer trying to solve a problem,” he said.
And by preventing those production line stoppages with a plastic crate, he did.
“[It] saved the industry a tremendous amount of money…I was just delighted we could do something that solved a problem in the industry.”
Can you buy a milk crate?
It does feel like they’re simply too useful to give back. But each crate taken out of circulation, likely means another plastic crate needs to be made. Which means if you’ve taken two dozen of them for a storage container or a temporary chair, you’re not exactly recycling.
But you can buy one new for around $20, which won’t push up the cost of milk or mess with the supply chain.
Food for thought, anyway.
