Easily Recyclable

Our cartons are fully recyclable where the infrastructure is in place. Recycling lessens the need for virgin material and reduces waste. Our clear goal is to prevent our cartons from going to landfill and we strongly promote the recycling of cartons.

Paper fibers from beverage cartons are highly desirable because they consist of strong virgin fibers. Our cartons contain fibers of very high quality that can be recycled up to seven times. After collection and sorting, beverage cartons go to dedicated paper recycling mills. Here, water and agitation separate the paper fiber from the plastic and aluminum layers. The result is a paper fraction used to make new products, such as secondary packaging material.

The polymers and aluminum fraction (known as polyal) can be reprocessed in a number of ways. The plastics and the aluminum can be reprocessed together. Similarly, there are new technologies emerging to derive maximum value from the polyal fractions. Several such new reprocessing facilities have been commissioned. Outputs from these processes include secondary raw materials and agglomerated materials for the manufacture of moulded products. Read about polyal recycling.

The beverage carton recycling rate in Europe has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years. In 2019, the average recycling rate in Europe rose to 51%. Canada recycles 60% of its beverage cartons. Over 60% of U.S. citizens have access to beverage carton recycling.

Whether a carton is recycled or not depends on the local and national systems in place for collection, sorting and recycling.
The challenge is to make national collection and recycling facilities more widely available and easily accessible, so more people can recycle. Therefore, Elopak works together with industry peers to increase and strengthen the collection and recycling of cartons in our markets. The beverage carton industry continues to support recycling through promoting innovation in recycling solutions, stakeholder engagement and collaboration.

Elopak is an active member of dedicated beverage carton associations in many countries. Here you can learn more about how some of these countries collect and recycle beverage cartons: USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary. Elopak is a founding member of EXTR:ACT, an organization dedicated to increasing the collection and recycling of beverage cartons in Europe.