The company told letsrecycle.com last night that it is leading a £3 million drive by the Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment in the UK (ACE UK) to provide local district authorities with up to five bring banks, which it will also service.
The scheme aims to address increasing environmental concerns that cartons cannot be recycled by boosting the number of councils offering carton recycling facilities.
At present, it is estimated that 120 of the 434 district councils in the UK have some kind of beverage carton recycling service and Tetra Pak hopes to achieve full coverage by the end of 2008.
John Rose, marketing director at Tetra Pak, said: “Carton recycling for us is something that needs to be sorted. Tetra Pak will provide a limited but full bring bank service to councils and our model is five banks per district.
“The response has been very positive from local authorities so far and at the moment we are putting bins on the ground for three to five councils every day,” he added.
Assistance
Under Tetra Pak's initiative, cartons will be reprocessed at the Orebro mill in Sweden following the closure of the only UK mill capable of reprocessing cartons – which are made up of fused paper, plastic and metal – at Fettykil in Scotland last year (see letsrecycle.com story) . Here Tetra Pak receives around £10 to £20 a tonne for the material which contributes to transport costs.
Although Tetra Pak is running ongoing trials with UK paper mills to see if cartons could be recycled here, it explained there were not yet the market drivers in place to make this a reality.
Mr Rose said: “We are prioritising collections at the moment over the trials as the economic drivers for recycling cartons in the UK are not that strong and they are a tiny part (0.2%) of the waste stream. The technical level in the UK also means that most places require capital investment to be able to recycle cartons which with rising energy costs is hard to justify.”
Kerbside
In the long-term, Mr Rose explained that he hoped UK councils would take over carton recycling by introducing kerbside collections alongside other materials, which in turn could provide the tonnages to encourage UK mills to reprocess cartons.
He said: “We would expect to offer our bring bank service for the next two years and our intention is to work with local authorities to move collections to the kerbside. If it needs further funding we expect to contribute.”
“If more volume comes through the business case will get better and better and we would hope to see a UK carton reprocessing facility in the not too distant future,” he added.
Tetra Pak's bring bank initiative is its latest environmental drive after the company pledged £300,000 last year to help councils set up carton recycling scheme (see letsrecycle.com story) .
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