I hate to lower the tone here but .... what happened to white dog poo? I know that I used to see it when I was a child, but it seems to have become extinct.
Did I hear a poo question? My specialist subject?
I
believe the answer to the Great White Dog Poo question is that it is all to do with a cultural change in doggies' calcium intake. In Ye Olden Days everyone used to give their dogs big bones to chew and a lot of it ended up in their stomachs. The poo was therefore bone/calcium rich and when it had, er, dried up a bit it ended up skeleton-whitish. These days butchers don't (aren't allowed to?) sell bones because of BSE etc and dog owners probably wouldn't give them bones anyway because doggy books warn against it. Hence the demise of the familar sight of our childhood, little whirls of white doggy poo gracing our streets.
It was tough in those days you know, having to avoid stepping on the cracks in the pavement because that meant bad luck and avoiding the white doggy poo because that meant even worse luck.
Milk bottles: They do still exist in certain carefully protected habitats. I get my milk delivered, by Mick the Milkman, in bottles. It's a bit more expensive* than buying it in the shops but my main reason for doing so was precisely as Don B says. I know you can take plastic milk containers for recycling, which is what I used to do, but it still seems more wasteful than simply leaving the empties out to be re-used. (At least I assume it is. I'm prepared to be told that, counter-intuitively, it's actually the other way round and it's more energy intensive to wash milk bottles.)
* Actually, in practice, it's much more expensive. What I hadn't realised when I signed up with Mick the Milkman is that he is always doing things like having all his hair cut off or sitting in baths of baked beans for charity. It puts the unit price per pinta up to alarming levels.
