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Drink…and read! In Japan, students at an elementary school use milk bottles unlike anything you see anywhere. They contain a comic strip that is only revealed as you consume it. Objective: drink everything to be in good health and above all to put an end to waste.
30 kg per person per year. This is the proportion of waste losses per household estimated by the Ministry of Ecology. In the trash, we found food still wrapped (i.e. 7 kg out of the estimated 30 kg) but also bread. In 2021, an OpinionWay study for Startway revealed that 35% of French people threw away bread at least once a month. Fruits suffer the same fate for 33% of respondents, as do vegetables (30%), unfinished dishes (29%) as well as dairy products (25%).
Regarding this last section, a company specializing in milk in Japan has found the solution: engrave a comic strip, or more precisely a manga, into its bottles, a true cultural art in the land of the rising sun. The Seki Milk company used white ink to print the story on the container to encourage consumers to consume the milk to the end. As you sip it, the images reveal themselves, and logically you only want to finish the bottle to know the end. The creation of the manga was entrusted to the illustrator Amiakihiko.
Entitled “Milk Comic” (comic meaning comic strip in English), the initiative, which is original to say the least, only concerns an experiment in a primary school in the town of Seki, in Gifu prefecture. Japanese children receive the famous bottle of milk at lunch. The Tokyo advertising agency supporting the promotion of this project states in a video that 65% of students do not finish their bottle of milk, touted in Japan as an essential element to stock up on calcium.