tetra pak petition your council

gromituk

But it doesn't say anything about Tetra-Pak's profits.

Altarf

Ksandra wrote:

Recycling Tetra-pak in the UK isn't actually environmentally friendly. The only facility in the UK to be able to recycle it was in Fife, but that has just closed down, so now the nearest recycling plant is in Iceland.

Most is actually going to Norway.

Ksandra wrote:

Bearing in mind the process involved in washing off the wax and foil etc, when combined with the environmental damage of the aircraft to fly it to the plant, please, please, please, DON'T write to your council asking them to recycle tetra-pak. Find alternative products preferably sold in aluminium cans (as there is hardly any drop in quality of aluminium no matter how many times it is recycled, so it can in theory be reused indefinately) or if not plastic bottles (plastic cartons are also very hard to recycle because the quality of the cartons is so low).

Could you please tell me where sells orange juice, milk, etc in aluminium cans, because I have never seen it anywhere.

If you choose plastic bottles instead of tetra-paks, then you end up with 50 times more lorries delivering the empty plastic bottles to the packaging plant (the tetra-paks are delivered on a roll to the packaging factories) and twice as many lorries delivering the filled bottles (square boxes pack more). Everything has its pros and cons.

Apparently the problem with the recycling facility in Scotland was a lack of material to recycle. They were having to ship it in from Ireland to make up for what wasn't being supplied from the UK local authorities.

So why aren't the UK local authorities interested in recycling tetra-paks? They are given targets of a percentage of household waste to recycle, but this is based on weight. Which would you choose to recycle to meet your targets, one glass bottle or twenty five tetra-paks, given that these weigh the same? Only one item to handle with the glass bottle and only 1/25th of the landfill tax if you dump the tetra-pak in the ground?

Why do you think that councils have now started to collect green garden waste, when they used to charge you to take it away? Because it is heavy and recyclable and makes their figures look good. According to figures published by my local authority they used to collect 2,000 tonnes of garden waste per annum, but they now collect 35,000 tonnes per annum. Surely sending lorries to collect an extra 33,000 tonnes of waste is a bad thing? They only used to recycle 65,000 tonnes of household waste per annum out of 325,000 tonnes, but by collecting an extra 33,000 tonnes they have increased their recycling rate from 20% to 28%, which looks good to the 'Greens'. Never mind the fact that they still dump exactly the same amount of household waste in landfill, but now have the environmental impact of lorries driving around collecting the extra 33,000 tonnes of waste.