Another breakfast over, another orange juice carton to throw away. But wait, which bin does it go in? If you’re like my husband, it goes straight into the black recycling box. Even though I’ve told him time and time again that our council does not collect them (that they need to go in the cupboard under the stairs, ready to be taken on a journey to the supermarket), he just cannot understand why, when we can recycle nearly everything else, these ubiquitous cartons are banned from the box. So, the carton is duly relegated to the cupboard, until the next time he goes to throw one away when it happens all over again.

And the next time always comes around quite quickly. Made up of virgin, FSC-certified paperboard (70-90 per cent), low-density polyethylene (10-25 per cent) and aluminium foil (about five per cent in long-life packages only), the innovative carton packaging has the ability to extend a product’s shelf life and is durable and lightweight, so is a popular packaging choice. As more and more of our food is being put into cartons – from juices to soups to tomatoes - the amount being put onto the market is rising at a rapid rate. The three major carton companies (Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc and Elopak) put 58,000 tonnes of cartons onto the UK market last year. (With roughly 50,000 cartons in a tonne, that’s nearly three billion containers!).

Yet, despite the potential to recycle these items, most still wind up in black bin bags. At present, it is estimated that around 3,000 tonnes are recycled – just five per cent by weight. What’s more, with no dedicated carton recycling facility in the UK since the
closure of the Smith Anderson facility in Fife in 2006, and fears of contamination in other plants, the cartons that are collected for recycling are shipped to Sweden.

Once there, however, the process appears to be straightforward. Baled cartons are simply dropped into a pulper, similar to a giant domestic food mixer, filled with water and pulped for 20 minutes.?This delaminates the packaging, allowing the aluminium foil and polyethylene to be separated from the paper fibres, which are recovered to make new paper products.?(Contrary to popular belief, there is no wax in the cartons to contaminate the paper.) The plastic and foil elements are then used in furniture, to generate energy or even separated out using plasma technology into pure aluminium and paraffin.

Faced with the recycling figures, one might question the opportunities for recycling by the UK householder. However, according to Tetra Pak, a large proportion of the UK has access to carton recycling. Indeed, infrastructure-wise, the UK carton industry trade body, the Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE UK) has been supporting local authorities to collect cartons for some time. The organisation provides bring site containers to encourage recycling and collects the cartons from council depots to send to Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, to date, 27.3 per cent of collection authorities take cartons in their recycling rounds, according to Fay Dashper, Recycling Manager at Tetra Pak, while 86 per cent overall have some sort of collection facility in their area. “Of the 406 local authorities, 111 collect at kerbside. Of those, 16 do kerbside sort, leaving 95 doing commingled collections.”

In terms of increasing capture of these multi-material beverage cartons, then, what needs to be done?

Richard Swannell, Director of Retail and Organics Programmes at WRAP, suggests that a move towards kerbside collections is required. “In conjunction with the On-Pack Recycling Labelling (OPRL) scheme, ACE UK has made significant investment in rolling out a bring bank scheme for beverage cartons across the UK. WRAP and ACE UK continue to work with local authorities to identify opportunities for more extensive kerbside collections as well.”

Mid Devon was the first local authority to extend carton recycling district-wide to its kerbside sort in 2005, when Tetra Pak backed the trial, including funding information leaflets for residents. Simon Hill, Recycling Officer with Mid Devon Council, says: “We saw that cartons were a growth area and at no extra cost, and with our current collection vehicles that are easily adapted with another small cage for such a small waste stream, we decided including cartons in our recycling scheme would add another string to our bow.”

Hill claims that, as with other waste streams, the anecdotal evidence is that around three times as many cartons are collected from the kerbside than at bring banks and explains that when they started carton recycling, the capture rate for other materials also rose.

Yet, with such a relatively small amount collected, the authority finds itself having to store the cartons until enough are collected to justify a pickup when sending the items for reprocessing. In the last year, there were just two collections: the first containing 25.62 tonnes in July 2009, the second, six months later, containing 19.16 tonnes.

But for Mid Devon there is an incentive. The authority is paid a respectable £43 per tonne for the cartons by Tetra Pak – something that other councils cannot expect, however. Dashper explains that the Mid Devon scheme was initiated before ACE UK started the bring banks in June 2007 and so is an exception. She is keen, nevertheless for the councils to be incentivised. “I think that there should be a financial inducement, but that that has to be driven by the market and at the moment that is not there. One of the things that we’d like to do is introduce UK processing so that we create a market price per tonne for cartons and that the industry starts to understand the quality of the fibre within carton and the quality of the polyethylene and the aluminium.” For the time being, however, the market value of cartons remains at £0 per tonne.

In order to achieve her aims, Dashper is keen to overcome the perception that cartons are difficult to collect on their own. “We have some good examples of where local authorities are collecting cartons on nets and the nets are on the back of the wagons, or where they’ve slightly changed their stillages so that they can collect cartons and maybe mixed plastics on the other side. I think most could do something, but there has always been this urban myth that cartons are difficult to recycle – whether that’s from an operational point of view of collecting them physically or in terms of processing – and that’s unfortunate.”

For the present, therefore, Dashper is focused on getting all local authorities collecting cartons at the kerbside in order to build up a guaranteed tonnage of cartons to create a market: “When it is realised the true value of polyethylene and aluminium, every single local authority across the UK could be collecting cartons as part of that
‘easy to recycle’ category in the same way as cardboard or cans.”

There’s certainly a mountain to climb before cartons are readily collected at the kerbside and recycled in the UK, but once in the box (along with mixed plastics), the residual summit would be a lot nearer the ground.