Beverage cartons – The resource efficient choice for dairy?
Richard Hands, chief executive, The Alliance for Beverage Cartons & the Environment UK explains why he thinks cartons are the way forward for dairy packaging
By ensuring products are brought to market in optimum condition, packaging has a vital and long-established role to play in the dairy supply chain. Beverage cartons protect the freshness, flavours and quality of both chilled and ambient dairy food and drink products. Used for a range of dairy products, beverage cartons are one of several packaging options available to the dairy industry. However, thanks to their renewable content and recyclability, they could become an increasingly attractive choice as a result of the European Commission’s focus on resource efficiency.
European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Potocnik, recently outlined the direction at a European level regarding resource efficiency. He makes it clear that policymakers will create market conditions to encourage resource efficiency, with prices and taxes reflecting the real costs of resource use.
Outlining the European Commission’s thinking, he states a number of priorities, which include:
• achieving ‘real and absolute decoupling’ of economic growth from resource use and pollution;
• recognising that future competitiveness will depend increasingly – perhaps overwhelmingly – on our ability to do more with less;
• driving down landfill rates as quickly as possible, and increasing recycling; and
• adopting life-cycle thinking with a holistic view on all phases of a product’s life.
The Alliance for Beverage Cartons & the Environment’s (ACE) members – Elopak, SIG Combibloc and Tetra Pak – are already focussed on decoupling growth from environmental impact.
Since 2000, the number of beverage cartons being produced has increased by an average of one per cent per year across Europe, whereas the recycling rate has increased by five per cent per year, and the number of cartons being sent to landfill has decreased by four per cent per year. In the UK, this has been driven by working with local authorities and waste management companies to increase kerbside collection of cartons, as well as ensuring cartons can be reprocessed in the UK through a new recycling plant opening in 2013.
The industry’s aim is to make it as easy as possible for all householders to recycle their cartons, and great progress is being made: since the beginning of 2011 alone the number of local authorities collecting cartons for recycling from the kerbside has risen from 31 to 46 per cent, and the industry expects this trend to continue. By comparison, only four per cent of local authorities collected cartons from the kerbside in 2006, showing that the picture has been transformed in a relatively short period.
Renewable too
In light of the Commission’s thinking, the environmental benefits of beverage cartons do not stop at recyclability. Most of a carton is also made from a renewable material, reducing its impact on the world’s finite resources. On average, a carton is made from 75 per cent paperboard, using wood fibre sourced from responsibly-managed forests.
In Sweden and Finland, where most of the wood fibre for European beverage cartons originates, forests are expanding. In Finland, for example, logging only harvests around two-thirds of growth each year: 58 million cubic metres versus forest growth of 104 million cubic metres.
Traceability of wood fibre, from finished packaging material back to responsibly managed forests, continues to be a key priority for the beverage carton industry. Within Europe, 100 per cent of the wood in the paperboard used by ACE member companies to make cartons comes from paper mills that have an FSC certified chain-of-custody in place. As Commissioner Potocnik states, harnessing well-managed renewable resources and increasing recycling options are fundamental to long-term sustainability.
