Tetra Pak and Alternatives for Liquid Food Packaging

The first Tetra Classic package was introduced in Sweden in 1953: the modern mass market was just born and the new package, manufactured with a minimum amount of material and extremely cost efficient to be produced, soon replaced the old counters and glass bottles, thanks to its functionality and convenience.

Nowadays Tetra Pak Group is one of the leading companies in liquid food packaging solutions and produces 100 billion aseptic cartons a year worldwide (5% of the overall market for liquid food packaging).

Tetra Pak is a light, carton-based package, generally composed of a laminate of paper (75%, makes the packages stiff), polyethylene (20%, renders them liquid-tight) and aluminium foil (5%, blocks out light and oxygen).

According to a compared LCA analysis carried out by CESQA (Centro Studi Qualita Ambiente, Padova University - Italy) in 2002, composite packages have a lower impact than PET and HDPE bottles, but other considerations are necessary to have a complete overview.

Even if Tetra Pak's main raw material derives from renewable and mostly certified sources (Sainsbury's will soon adopt the first FSC certified Tetra Pak carton), raw materials production requires a significant amount of resource use and emissions to air and water. The pulp and paper industry itself is reported to be the fourth-largest industrial emitter of Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) chemical into our water sources. Plastic derives from petroleum and virgin aluminium requires a really high-energy manufacturing processes to be obtained from bauxite. At the same time, Tetra Pak high quality fibres are easy to recycle, but the presence of plastic and aluminium layers make the cartons disposal anything but easy.

The presence of three different materials considerably complicate Tetra Pak recycling, beginning from the confusion in a customer's mind, who often have no idea where they should put the empty packages. In many countries it is already possible to collect post-consumer packages together with paper or other kind of waste, but special processes are still required to treat them in a proper way. Thermal compression and re-pulping are the most common ways to recycle Tetra Pak cartons, but they both produce mixed materials. The first method is used in Germany to produce Tectan: the cartons are shredded, heated and compressed; polyethylene melts and bonds all the scraps together. The material itself is not very attractive, as well as the products manufactured from it (chipboard-like boards and little moulded objects like edge protectors and core plugs). In other countries the packages are treated in special paper mills, where pulpers separate the paper fibres from plastic and aluminium contents. Fibers return to their original function and are used to produce other paper, while aluminium and polyethylene are melted together, granulated and used to produce little gadgets, pots, and roofing tiles.

At the present time, separating all the materials and recycling them independently is almost impossible: the available technology (plasma technology) is still under experimentation and the world's first Thermal Plasma recycling plant has been just inaugurated in Brazil. When it will work at full capacity, wood fibers should finally be obtained from the recycled cartons for the paper industry, paraffin for the petrochemicals industry, and aluminium at a high level of purity.

Because of the difficulties in collecting the old packages from the ordinary waste stream, the need for special plants and technologies and the lack of a relevant market demand for Tetra Pak recycled materials (apart from the wood fibres), carton recycling is complicated and economically disadvantageous. At the present time, Tetra Pak's global recycling rate is only 16.3% (2006) and the main part of the collected cartons is just burned into incinerators.

Finding possible alternatives to Tetra Pak is recommendable, but not that easy. Replacing Tetra Pak cartons with easily recyclable plastic bottles doesn't seem to be the ideal solution because of their high burden on the environment. Nevertheless some attempts to find greener ways to pack liquid foods are already available from different companies and I would like to compare some pros and cons.

For a long time in many countries like Canada, some South American and East European nations, milk has been usually sold in thin, monomaterial plastic bags similar to Calon Wen's Eco Pak. This low density polyethylene bag uses 75% less plastic than an equivalent polybottle; reduces its volume when empty and is potentially fully recyclable. Since the bags are not that easy to handle if compared to classic bottles or cartons, the producer also provides a re-usable and recyclable milk jug to make them more practical. In order to avoid these kind of problems, Ecolean has invented a more user-friendly, easy to open and pour package made of a mixture of polyethylene, polypropylene and chalk. If needed, the package can also be used for heating in microwave ovens and after emptying could be flatted to reduce its volume. According to the producers, Ecolean bag weighs 40-45% less than a carton package and 60-65% less than a plastic bottle of the same size. Even if the mixed material is not really good for recycling, the packages could be remanufactured as mixed plastics and used for products such as pallets, trays, or artificial wood.

On the other side, Innocent Drinks company choses to deliver its smoothies in a 100% recycled PET plastic bottle that, they say, reduces of 20% the material required thanks to a lighter design, while reduces of 55% the carbon footprint during its manufacturing. Another bottler, American Biota, instead has decided to bet on bio-polymer solutions and packs its water in compostable corn based PLA bottles that degrade within 75 to 80 days in a commercial composting situation.

Another ideal solution is going back to re-usable glass bottles, distributed and recollected by the producers themselves. Maybe this way could solve part of the problem in small communities, but it seems to be really hard to implement by big distributors in huge cities. The re-useable view can be also tricky for different reasons: first of all, though glass has the lowest environmental cost per ton compared with plastic, it requires greater quantities to be an effective packaging material and if more material is used, then the environmental cost increases. Second, unlike garbage trucks, collection trucks cannot compact their load and because re-usable bottles fill up a lot of space, the collecting operation results on a great consume of fuel for small quantities of material transported, increasing as well the environmental impact. Naturally only an accurate compared LCA analysis could indicate which is the best solution, but in general it could be affirmed that every time disposable packaging is the issue, looking to weight and volume reduction solutions, such as to monomaterial and easy recyclable or compostable packages seems to be the best way to go one step further. After all the less we produce, transport, and throw away, the less our impact will be.

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