Interesting! Yeah, please update / comment if you find anything.
Uhhhh, I’d be veeeery interested in knowing percentages for recycling of Tetra pak style packaging. Their website makes it sound like it’s super easy to recycle them but I’d think it would be almost impossible to get this glued together mess of paper, plastic and other stuff recycled (I’d love to be wrong about that, obviously). I also read somewhere that there’s like one plant in the UK that can actually recycle these but no idea if that is accurate.
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it’s about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I’ll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.
Interesting! Yeah, please update / comment if you find anything.
Uhhhh, I’d be veeeery interested in knowing percentages for recycling of Tetra pak style packaging. Their website makes it sound like it’s super easy to recycle them but I’d think it would be almost impossible to get this glued together mess of paper, plastic and other stuff recycled (I’d love to be wrong about that, obviously). I also read somewhere that there’s like one plant in the UK that can actually recycle these but no idea if that is accurate.
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it’s about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
Thanks so much for this, these numbers look amazing!
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I’ll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.
Thank you 😸