THOUGHT you had seen the end of glass bottles? Well, don’t go consigning them to the annals of history just yet.

That is the message coming from a Bury farm which has witnessed an upsurge in popularity for their glass milk bottle delivery service of late.

Park Farm offers the service four days a week to people living in the Ramsbottom, Stubbins, Edenfield and Walmersley areas, with bottles sold at 60p a pint.

Demand has boomed during the last two months, and the recent BBC series Blue Planet II is responsible, according to Margaret Lees who runs the farm along with her husband John.

Narrated by David Attenborough, the hit series highlighted the damage that discarded plastic was doing to the world’s oceans and marine life.

The impact has been so profound that increasing numbers of people have since pledged to turn their backs on single-use plastics due to fears over their impact on the environment.

This increased awareness has recently manifested itself in an increased demand to switch to glass milk delivery services such as the one offered by Park Farm.

The farm, in Manchester Road, on the border of Ramsbottom and Walmersley, normally delivers between 500-600 bottles to customers on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

But, Mrs Lees says that over the last two months, between 50-100 people have been in touch, with more enquiries continuing to flow in every day.

She said: “Since Blue Planet aired we have been inundated with enquires from people wanting to change to glass bottles.

“This is something we have been doing for years. Unconsciously, our customers have been doing their bit for the environment, but the issue has been brought to light recently.”

Mrs Lees says that much of the demand has come from adults in their 20s and 30s.

She added: “The younger generation want to make a difference, even if it is a small one in changing from plastic to glass.

“People are a lot savvier these days and educated about where their food is coming from.

“We are really fortunate in this country that we have got the luxury of choice in our diets, but we don’t recycle enough and we waste too much.

“We live in a throwaway society and that is going full circle at the moment. A lot more people are becoming interested in recycling and shopping locally and cutting food miles.”

The farm is well-known to many Bury residents for its popular farm shop and tea room, which specialises in homemade and local produce using traceable ingredients.

Its owners say that the key to their success has been recycling, something that has been practised at the farm since it was purchased by Mrs Lees’ mother-in-law and father-in-law in 1957.

“We are not a run of the mill dairy farm,” said Mrs Lees.

“We still bottle our milk in our own way. It is processed here, put into glass bottles and then put into a fridge.

“We deliver that to customers who then leave their empty bottles on the door step on the following delivery and we wash them and use again."

Mrs Lees says that each milk bottle is refilled on average 20 times before it is either broken or lost.

However, until recently the demand for the farm's delivery service had declined, mirroring the national picture since supermarkets began dominating the market.

Between 1975 and 2016, the proportion of milk put into glass bottles fell from just less than 95 per cent to about three per cent.

But Park Farm are not alone in noticing a U-turn on that trend of late; a number of farms up and down the country have reported a similar experience in recent weeks.

Whether this proves to be a permanent shift in attitudes, or a brief fad, remains to be seen, but it seems as though it's not time to write the milkman off just yet.