Tetra Pack

We have chosen Tetra Pak for several reasons:

1) They protect your milk from harmful light and air. Milk contains a lot of important vitamins and minerals that are good for our health; riboflavin and vitamin B2 are examples of this. The problem with riboflavin however, is that it degrades when exposed to light. Cartons keep out the light, therefore protecting the goodness of the milk.

2) They are made from a natural, renewable resource – wood. Our planet’s resources are running out, and we believe it is important to choose products that minimise the use of these resources. Tetra Pak works hard to ensure that the forests they source from are responsibly managed and that the forests are growing in size overall. This benefits not only the plants and animals that live in them, but as trees absorb carbon and release oxygen, this gives an overall benefit to the planet.

3) They are low carbon. In life cycle/environmental studies across the world, cartons are repeatedly shown to be a low carbon, low resource packaging choice. These studies take in to account the full life of the package, including recycling and disposal, and they still out-perform. In fact, if you visit www.tetrapak.com/climate, you can see such just how well cartons compare. They have such a low carbon footprint for a number of reasons, this includes the fact that they use the minimal amount of materials to make the packaging, they are made mainly from renewable wood, they are so lightweight and they are so transport efficient. In fact, as cartons are delivered flat or in giant rolls before filling, you can save up to 50 trucks on the road, compared to formed bottles.

4) They are recyclable.

Tetra Pak and the carton industry have invested significant effort and funds into ensuring carton collection is widespread across the UK. Over 86% of Local Authorities in the UK have carton collection facilities, with 15% of these with kerbside collection. You can easily find the nearest place to recycle your cartons on the interactive map found at the top of the page on www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk . This is shown as a blue tab saying ‘where can I recycle?"

We want recycling to be as easy as possible for people, and to do this, Tetra Pak have:

1) Worked with each Local Authority to place each bank on sites that would be the most use to people. Many of these are located on supermarket or civic amenity sites.

2) Worked with Local Authorities to help them move to kerbside collection. In fact, now that more and more people are aware cartons are recyclable, they are asking their Local Authorities for doorstep access and this has caused the number of Local Authorities collecting at kerbside to double in the past year. More areas are scheduled to shift soon.

Unfortunately, there is no longer a UK site where cartons get recycled. Tetra are certainly working towards this, but you may be surprised to consider that by recycling cartons in neighbouring European Countries over the UK, the carbon impact of the transport is counter-acted by the greater user of renewable energy in these countries!