'Tetra pak' recycling ceased due to high costs for Orkney

Orkney Islands Council is advising that from next month (April 2024) ‘tetra pak’ style cartons will no longer be accepted for recycling at its Household Waste and Recycling Centres, due to the high costs incurred in transporting them for reprocessing.

There is only one plant for recycling tetra pak (cartons made of paperboard, lined with plastic and aluminium to protect its contents) in the UK - located in Halifax, 515 miles south of Orkney by road and ferry, and 370 miles south of Aberdeen where cartons are initially shipped to from Kirkwall.

Lorna Richardson, Head of Neighbourhood Services at Orkney Islands Council, explains some of the reasons behind the decision to remove tetra pak from the items accepted for recycling at Council waste facilities:

“We were advised by our supplier in Orkney last summer that they’d no longer be able to provide support to collect and dispose of our tetra pak cartons every eight weeks.

“Since then, we have looked at the other options available to us - but none are financially viable or suitable.

“Meantime we had still been accepting Tetra Packs at our facilities, in the hope that we’d find a solution.

“Unfortunately that’s not been the case, so we are reluctantly having to recall the tetra pak skips with effect from April.

“Some of the challenges of recycling tetra pak style packaging from Orkney include our small population. It would take us around seven years to stockpile enough tetra pak to effectively bale and transport – by which time the organic material has started to rot, making it difficult to handle and unsuitable for recycling, and likely to be rejected by processors at the other end.

“We did consider transporting them loose more frequently - but the transport costs are extremely high as they are a lightweight but high volume material.

“The cost of transporting them to Shetland along with the rest of Orkney’s waste for the Energy Recovery plant there is a tiny fraction of the cost of getting them recycled in Halifax.

“We understand many will be disappointed by this news. Tetra pak is made of a mixture of paper, aluminium and plastic. It is therefore not an easy material to recycle and would contaminate our other recycling streams, if it was mixed together.

“Folks may therefore wish to try buy products in alternative packaging, or find ways to re-use tetra pak wherever possible.”

Some of the possibilities for re-use of tetra pak are:

• Cut the top off and use for planting seeds
• Remove the top, decorate the outside and use for a pen or crayon pot
• Cut a flap in the front and suspend for a bird feeder
• Use as soap or candle moulds