BEAU Viney the 'e-cow warrior' is on a green mission to make dairies and supermarkets re-think the way they package their milk.

Beau, and her baby called Calf Pint, have been created by West Devon artist Nick Viney as the focus of an artistic protest and campaign against the use of plastic milk containers.

The pair will be the showpiece exhibit at a collection of her works at the Duchy Square Centre for Creativity in Princetown tomorrow (Friday).

Nick also hopes to get the royal seal of approval for her campaign when Prince Charles visits the centre the same day.

Nick — resident artist and sculptor at the Duchy Square — is backing Government calls for the dairy industry to become more sustainable, using Beau and her baby —created from different sizes of plastic milk containers with the help of her daughter Drew Mortimore.

Last year, the UK's Food and Farming Minister Lord Rooker targeted a 50 per cent reduction of plastic used in milk packaging by 2020.

Green campaigners have long warned that the sale of millions of plastic milk cartons are threatening the environment, with Britons consuming around 180 million pints of milk each week – two thirds of which is sold in plastic bottles.

The plastic containers largely replaced Tetra Pak cardboard containers during the Nineties, but despite increasing calls for people to go greener – only one in four plastic bottles are thought to be recycled. It has also been calculated that if all plastic milk bottles in the UK were replaced with plastic pouches, 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste would be saved from landfill sites.

 Nick – who runs her own 'Green with NV Studio'  — plans to begin her campaign close to home by calling on Somerset dairy giant Robert Wiseman to switch from plastic to more eco-friendly packaging - and she even has a design idea of her own that she would like to work with the dairy to develop. 

Nick said: 'This is an issue particularly close to my heart as where I live near Yelverton, there is no facility for the collection of plastic from my home.

'Both Waitrose and Asda have been trialling the use of alternative packaging for milk in recent years and it is time for some of the big dairy operations like Wiseman's to follow suit.

'I plan to write to Wiseman's raising this issue and who knows? Beau and Calf Pint might even pay them a visit!'  

Opened in March and supported by a number of organisations, including Duchy of Cornwall and Devon County Council, the Duchy Square Centre for Creativity offers low cost workshop space on two floors and is helping boost the local economy by connecting local businesses with other key industry sectors.

The artists and creative practitioners take part in workshops organised by the centre, but also stage their own sessions with smaller groups in their own studios.

Anyone wishing to find out more about the workshops on offer should call 01822 890828 or visit the website where contact details for all the artists can be found.