Schulz Organic Dairy milks one herd on Ford and Fells Road at Timboon, in Victoria's south west, and since 2017 it has sold that milk in glass you give back. It began with hand filled bottles at farmers markets. In 2018 the family asked customers to help pay for a proper returnable bottle, and 1,182 of them put in more than $106,000; the bottle, designed by Contain Design, reached shops in 2019. Each one carries a deposit, refunded when the clean bottle comes back to be washed and filled again, and by the company's count more than 1.64 million plastic bottles have been avoided that way, over 65 tonnes of plastic that never went to landfill. From the start, though, the bottles themselves were imported. "From the beginning, we hoped one day to bring production of our bottle back to Australia," founder Simon Schulz says. "It's been a long journey with plenty of setbacks along the way, but we never lost sight of that vision."

On 1 July 2026 the Australian made bottle, produced by Orora in South Australia, went onto shelves across Victoria, with a refreshed label by Swear Words and printing by Cutler Graphics. Its deposit rose from two dollars to three, still fully refundable, and the milk inside is unchanged: organic, from the one herd, gently pasteurised, not homogenised and bottled on the farm. Navan Kaur reported the switch for PKN Packaging News. On the same morning, a long way north, the Northern Territory became the first part of Australia to accept plain milk containers in its container deposit scheme, so a milk bottle there now earns a refund at the depot like a drink can. Two ways of making a bottle worth bringing back, a dairy's deposit and a territory's scheme, started on the same day.

Our short take: the full story is by Navan Kaur for PKN Packaging News, 2 July 2026; the figures and Simon Schulz's words are from the dairy's own announcement of 30 June 2026 by Luke Bone; the Northern Territory change is from the NT Government.