The service is to be provided by Midlands-based collection company Recresco, which has struck a deal with Tetra Pak to offer recycling services for cartons, to be collected commingled with plastic bottles using bring banks.
 Recresco is to collect cartons commingled with its plastic bottle scheme |
Cartons collected by Recresco will then be sent to Tetra Pak itself to organise the reprocessing of the material. The company is sending cartons to Europe for reprocessing, and is also running trials with UK paper mills.
The new service forms part of Tetra Pak's work towards providing nationwide carton collections by the end of 2008 (see letsrecycle.com story). Cartons are relatively difficult to recycle because they are made from fused paper, plastic and aluminium.
The UK is thought to be recycling only around 4% of its cartons at present, but Tetra Pak wants to reach a 10% recycling rate over the next few years.
Richard Hands, environment manager at Tetra Pak said: “Beverage cartons can be recycled, but both carton collection and recycling still lag well behind European levels.”
He added: “We're making great strides towards reaching our goal of national coverage of carton collection by the end of 2008, with around 100 areas either collecting or in the pipeline. We hope even more local authorities will take advantage of this opportunity to provide residents with the recycling opportunity they want.”
Collection
The new Recresco partnership is already beginning to collect cartons from councils including Solihull, East Hertforshire, Mansfield, St Helens and Gedling.
John Ferguson, development manager at Recresco, said: “There's no doubt consumers are more environmentally-conscious than ever before and recycling officers across the UK are being bombarded with requests from residents wanting to recycle as many materials as possible. Our partnership with Tetra Pak means we can now offer local authorities the opportunity to reclaim more and more materials from the waste bin to the recycling bin.”
On the scheme, residents place their cartons in specially-designed bring banks along with plastic bottles, with Recresco using their vacuum vehicles to suck the commingled bottles and cartons out of the bring banks when it is time for collection. Each vehicle can carry around four tonnes of material at a time.
Mr Ferguson said that the carton scheme would incur an extra collection charge for councils, but insisted it would be good value.
He said: “By combining the collection of the two streams, carton recycling is affordable and achievable and we can help make it a reality in any area of the UK.”
Reprocessing
The cartons and bottles collected on the scheme are then separated at Recresco's Nottingham materials recycling facility, before being sent to Tetra Pak for reprocessing.
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At present, the paper fraction of cartons can be pulped and recycled into new paper products. The plastic and aluminium fractions have been used to make products like garden furniture and roofing materials, but is often sent to energy recovery plants or cement kilns.
Tetra Pak said it is developing “plasma technology”, which it claimed “enables the total separation of the polyethylene and aluminium. This permits the return of all three components of the carton to the productive chain as raw material.”
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