Circular economy thinking Last year, delivery service Milk & More invested £6.5 million in 200 electric vans to help meet the needs of an online customer base that had increased by 40,000 households in the first six months of the year. 90% of their customers order milk in one pint glass bottles, which are reused on average 25 times. This is the essence of the transition to a circular economy: replacing a fossil-fuelled take-make-dispose value chain and replacing it with a system in which valuable resources (including packaging) are reused, refurbished, remanufactured or recycled – and ideally powered by sustainable energy sources. And although the idea of delivering milk in reusable bottles through electric floats seems like a quaint throwback to the past, their return is part of a broader interest in "direct-to-consumer" (D2C) brands like Dollar Shave Club and Graze, which have both been acquired by Unilever for over US$1 billion.