Fay Dashper, national recycling operations manager at Tetra Pak, said she was pleased with the success of the scheme. It was originally only set to run for two years but she said “it will be very hard to pull away from this scheme” and pledged to continue helping councils recycle cartons.
She said that 90% of councils now collect drinks cartons, 4% of which send their cartons to energy-from-waste incinerators (EfW) for energy recovery. The rest goes to recycling and the majority of this is collected by ACE UK, free of charge, and transported to Sweden for reprocessing.
The bring bank scheme has also encouraged councils to implement kerbside collection of drinks cartons. Ms Dashper explained that this was the long term aim of the scheme and thanks to its influence, 11% of councils now offered residents the option of recycling drinks cartons at the kerbside. ACE UK will pick up sorted materials free of charge, if requested, but Ms Dashper said that the majority of councils fund the collections and make their own arrangements for the materials to be baled as mixed fibres at UK reprocessors.
She said: “It's a natural progression as kerbside recycling develops and a natural evolution from the bring bank schemes.”
Ms Dashper claimed that kerbside collection could retrieve 62% of drinks cartons on the market, whereas bring banks only retrieved about 10%. She maintained that this was one of the reasons Tetra Pak and ACE UK were “working with local authorities to encourage them to collect cartons at the kerbside and trying to understand the needs of local authorities while educating them about carton recycling”.
Currently there are no drinks carton recycling facilities in the UK and Tetra Pak exports all the material it collects to a plant in Orebro, Sweden, for recycling. However, Ms Dashper revealed that, due to the success of the recycling initiative and an increase in the volume of post consumer waste cartons collected, Tetra Pak was currently running new trials on treating the material in the UK, after initial trials were put on ice last year due to insufficient volumes (see letsrecycle.com story).
The trials are in the “initial stages” and are taking place in two locations in the UK. There is also a piece of research due soon on the subject.
Guernsey
The most recent recruit to the scheme is Guernsey, and the council has received eight bins from ACE UK which will take Tetra Paks and other drinks cartons. It is hoped the bring banks will divert a proportion of the 250-300 tonnes of cartons which are landfilled each year.
HSBC Securities Services is also supporting the scheme on the island by providing £40,000 towards collection and this will help offset the costs of shipping the waste from the island. Ms Dashper explained that HSBC have a number of agreements with Guernsey to help manage waste and reduce the cost of exporting waste from the island.
Brenda Petsche, managing director of HSBC Securities Services (Guernsey) Limited commented: “HSBC is committed to supporting community programmes that promote important environmental messages and has been looking for an iniative like this that involves the whole community.”
Ms Dashper added: “It is fantastic that Guernsey has added cartons to the list of materials collected for recycling and we very much hope the initiative is successful. Along with our industry partners we are committed to increasing carton recycling and establishing a national network of collection points by the end of 2008. Our work with Guernsey takes us a step closer to that goal.”
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