Homeless in Vancouver: Um, Gort milk?

Yesterday a homeless binner on a bicycle approached me with a returnable glass milk bottle that he didn’t know what to do with.

It was from Gort’s Gouda Cheese Farm and I told him where he could cash it in but he still ended up giving the bottle to me because he was tired of carrying it around on his bike—it was much larger and heavier than the Avalon Dairy bottles he was familiar with.

Doing the milk bottle shuffle

Every binner knows what to do with an “Avalon”.

The Avalon Dairy glass milk bottle is the gold standard of returnable beverage containers in Vancouver. The one-litre glass milk bottles—and the seldom seen 500-millilitre variety—both have a one dollar deposit value, redeemable at any store that sells them, and glass-bottled Avalon milk is sold in lots of grocery stores, big and small, all over Metro Vancover.

By comparison, Gort’s milk, in the 1.89-litre glass bottle, is only sold in Metro Vancouver at the four locations of the upscale Whole Foods Market grocery store chain: Cambie, Kitsilano, Robson, and West Vancouver.

I’ve found and cashed in thousands of Avalon milk bottles in 10 years but I haven’t found 10 Gort’s milk bottles.

I cashed in this Gort’s milk bottle at the Whole Foods Market location on the southwest corner of Cambie Street and 8th Avenue. It was worth a cool $2, half of which I gave back to the surprised binner who’d found it.

I was happy enough to be able to milk it for a blog post.