Cartons are everywhere - each year 55,000 tonnes of them are produced to hold food and drinks such as milk, juice and sauces - this is around 2.3kg of cartons per household per year.Cartons are not made from paper alone but are made up of about 75% paper, 20% plastic (polyethylene) and 5% aluminium foil (for long-life products). As they are an mixture of different materials, they cannot be recycled along with ordinary paper.
At the time of writing, most councils in the UK don't have carton recycling facilities although in Germany they do, where 70% of cartons are recycled. Tetrapak (the world's biggest producer of cartons) have set up a website which gives information on where to recycle their cartons in the UK. They are also looking to work in conjunction with the Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment to set up schemes for local councils.
When you've dropped your cartons off at the recycling bins, they are taken en-mass to a recycling plant in Sweden. Here they are put into a pulper for around 20 minutes which breaks down the packaging to produce a grey-brown mixture. The aluminium foil and polyethylene are separated from the fibre, which is recovered to make new paper products and the remaining mix of plastic and aluminium can then be used in furniture, to generate energy or even separated out into pure aluminium and paraffin.
Whilst this is all very well and good I can't help but wonder how much of our natural resources we're using to transport them to Sweden and then recycle them. It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to make the decision not to use them in the first place, after all, as any doctor will tell you, prevention is better than cure.