The UK uses around 3.5bn beverage cartons per year, containing primarily milk and fruit juice, but also an increasingly wide range of food products, such as pulses and chopped tomatoes. This equates to around 60 000 tonnes of cartons each year, around 2.3kg per household, for local authorities and waste management companies to deal with. Although cartons are 100 percent recyclable, in 2003 just one of the UK's 406 waste collection authorities included cartons in its kerbside recycling scheme. Three years later, in 2006, still only four percent of local authorities collected cartons as part of their kerbside recycling services. Since then, however, real progress has been made - both in terms of improving collection infrastructure and creating a UK market for recycling the valuable resources used in carton packaging - with 56 percent of local authorities now collecting cartons at kerbside.
展开▼
