Why do councils seem to have difficulty recycling Tetra?
Up until June 2006, lots of the UK’s carton recycling happened at a paper mill in Fife. Unfortunately this mill has now been closed. In response to this, Tetra Pak provided an initial £300,000 National Recycling Fund, and along with industry partners in ACE UK, they have invested a further £1.5m to support local authorities in setting up recycling and collection facilities. They are now offering a cost neutral recycling bank solution to all local authorities that are not yet collecting cartons. We know that this isn’t the perfect answer, but we’ve decided that causing more environmental damage by switching to more plastic to get round the difficulties of Tetra Pak recycling will never help change the status quo. A lifecycle analysis of Tetra Pak versus PET plastic shows Tetra Pak puts a lighter load on the environment overall due to much less processing of source material (i.e. trees not oil) and much less transport emissions and energy usage.
