"When was the last time you enjoyed a glass of orange juice from a Tetra Pak carton? Made from a mix of plastic, paper, and aluminum, those containers do a great job of keeping beverages fresh. They're also likely to end up as non-biodegradable waste that burdens landfills, costs money, and puts the squeeze on the environment.

Natural Solution
You may be thinking this story is about recycling used cartons, and perhaps making a business of it.
But it's not. That has already been done. Across Europe, the system for collecting and recycling cartons is well developed. Every year, around 25 billion containers end up at recycling plants, where the paper fiber is extracted and remanufactured into new packaging such as cereal boxes.

Residual Problem
Which is terrific ... as far as the paper portion of your drink carton is concerned. But what about the plastic and the aluminum? You're not likely to see those in a cereal box. The reason is that the gooey muck left over from the paper part of the recycling process gets dumped into landfills. For a large recycler such as Stora Enso in Barcelona, that means 30,000 tons a year of sludge, costing about 1.3 million British pounds to "tip" into the Earth. Messy."