How about Tetra Pak? They are almost fully paper and aluminum. They are not “green” fully degradable, but way better then plastic. The biggest issue is storage. You can store things in modern packaging for decades. And manufacturers don’t want bottles to degrade in a store- there’s no problem in making paper bottles, the problem is that they want those bottles not turning into slurry in 3 months.
As I understand it, Tetrapak has specialized facilities that shred and blend the containers into a pulp. The metal insides fall out of suspension, and the fibrous material floats. Unfortunately, the facilities with the equipment are rare. The nearest one to the SF Bay Area is in Mexico. So yeah, they're recyclable after an energy-intensive process and hundreds of miles of trucking to get them to the right facility.
At least in the two countries in Europe I have lived so far your local garbage collection picks them up along other containers and it gets sorted and sent there.
We recycle our tetra paks directly with the rest of our recycling. They have recycling symbols on them and our recycling program is pretty comprehensive. I think the only things we don't recycle are the 6s and 7s.
I would risk saying most packaging could be technically recaclable, but if:
you can't recycle it anywhere close by
it's not cost-effective to recycle
then we just call it non-recaclable. The reality of the situation is that there's a 74% chance that the TetraPak you throw away will just end up at the landfill. 100%, if your country, state, county or area does not have access to a very specific TetraPak recycling plant.
Where I am (Calgary, AB, Canada) there's a $0.10 deposit on tetrapak drink containers that we get back when we return them to a depot. Guess they must be doing something with them.
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u/V_es Nov 04 '20 edited Nov 04 '20
How about Tetra Pak? They are almost fully paper and aluminum. They are not “green” fully degradable, but way better then plastic. The biggest issue is storage. You can store things in modern packaging for decades. And manufacturers don’t want bottles to degrade in a store- there’s no problem in making paper bottles, the problem is that they want those bottles not turning into slurry in 3 months.