May/June 2013
Gable-top and aseptic container recycling has matured rapidly in recent years, thanks in part to U.S. manufacturers’ efforts to spur this material’s collection, separation, and consumption.
By Ken McEntee
Four years ago, the recycling of poly-coated paperboard cartons in North America was in its infancy, with only one mill—Atlas Paper Mills, a tissue and towel maker in Miami—buying cartons as a stand-alone grade. Today, the market is in its adolescence, with six additional mills in the United States, one in Canada, and two in Mexico—10 mills in all—consuming postconsumer cartons, according to the Carton Council of North America (Vernon Hills, Ill.). Though that growth reflects considerable progress and maturation, the council expects further North American demand for cartons as more mills seek the long, strong, bleached virgin fiber they contain. Supply should be able to keep pace with that demand if the use of cartons grows as expected and if the Carton Council’s recycling initiatives succeed. In short, the North American carton recycling market could soon enter adulthood.
Expanding Access
Gable-top and aseptic cartons are the two most prevalent types of poly-coated paperboard containers used to package liquid products. Gable-top cartons have been in use since the early 1900s, primarily to hold milk, juice, and other liquids that require refrigeration. Those containers typically consist of 80 percent bleached paperboard and 20 percent polyethylene, which coats the inside and outside of the paperboard. Aseptic cartons, developed in the 1960s, hold liquids that are heated to a high temperature during packaging to give them a shelf life of a year or more without refrigeration. Aseptic containers typically are 74 percent paperboard, 22 percent PE, and 4 percent aluminum.
Carton recycling first took hold in Europe due to that continent’s greater use of aseptic packaging compared with North America, its tight landfill space, and its strict producer responsibility laws. “In Europe, 85 percent of liquid packaging is in aseptic cartons,” says Victor Storelli, owner of Storelli Recycling Co. (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.). “In the United States, it’s only 15 percent.” For those reasons, Europe has a well-developed carton recycling infrastructure, with almost 130 pulp and paper mills consuming postconsumer cartons.
The United States lacks Europe’s carton volume, landfill restrictions, and government mandates, and it lags behind that continent’s carton recycling efforts as well. Some of those market dynamics could change, however. Though poly-coated cartons previously found limited use in the U.S. market, primarily as packaging for milk and juice, they’re “beginning to grow in popularity,” Storelli says. “We’re starting to see soup, wine, and all kinds of products packaged in paper cartons.” The North American market also is changing on the recycling side, thanks largely to the Carton Council, which Tetra Pak (Vernon Hills, Ill.)—the world’s largest aseptic carton maker—formed in 2009 with Evergreen Packaging (Memphis, Tenn.), SIG Combibloc (Chester, Pa.), and Elopak (Wixom, Mich.).
The council’s goal is to sell more cartons by promoting the packaging’s environmental benefits to consumers, with recyclability a key marketing point in that effort. “We have a great package with a great carbon footprint and strong sustainability features, including that it’s made from a 100-percent renewable resource—paper from well-managed, certified forests,” says Jim Frey, CEO of Resource Recycling Systems (Ann Arbor, Mich.), a consultant to the council. “Plus, it’s easily recyclable, and the fibers are some of the best in the U.S. waste stream. They contain no ink because the printing on the cartons is contained on the polyethylene layer. Mills that use the material can get a high yield.”
To be sure, the cartons’ virgin fiber is their biggest selling point as a material for recycling and the main motivation for their recovery. Mills “can’t get better fiber,” says Lou Quintano, owner of Bristol Paper Recycling (Chappaqua, N.Y.). “It’s softwood—the longest, strongest fiber you can get. It’s the next-best, biggest untapped source of new fiber. If a mill is making a product that it’s selling as postconsumer, it needs this kind of fiber.”
To label poly-coated cartons “recyclable” without any additional qualifying statement, carton manufacturers first have to satisfy the Federal Trade Commission (Washington, D.C.) requirement that at least 60 percent of U.S. households have access to carton recycling programs. In 2009, when the Carton Council formed, only 22 percent of U.S. households had access to carton recycling, the council notes. “We needed to develop a strategy to increase access across the country,” Frey says. That strategy includes working with municipalities—starting with those that serve large populations—to add cartons to their residential recycling programs and helping MRFs sort cartons from residential recyclables by offering financial grants for equipment and developing end-use markets for the recovered cartons.
Four years into the council’s campaign, U.S. household access to carton recycling has reached 40 percent, and the council expects it to approach 50 percent by the end of 2013, Frey says. For tissue makers and recycled pulp mills, greater carton recovery has meant more available tons of postconsumer bleached chemical-grade fiber, prompting more mills to accept the material. In addition to Atlas, the North American mills that now consume postconsumer gable-top or aseptic cartons, or both, are Fibrek/Resolute Forest Products (Fairmont, W.Va., and Menominee, Mich.), Fox River Fiber Co. (De Pere, Wis.), South Georgia Tissue (Barnell, S.C.), Tissue Technology (De Pere, Wis.), SCA Tissue North America (Barton, Ala.), Groupe RCM (Yamachiche, Québec), Grupo Empresarial Transforma (San Juan Del Río, México), and Kimberly-Clark de México (México City). Further, The ReWall Co. (Des Moines, Iowa) turns the cartons into “green” building materials such as wall board and ceiling tiles (see “Building Up Carton Recycling” on page 108). “What’s unique about the market development of this grade is that the Carton Council is doing the work so mills don’t have to develop supply sources on their own,” Frey says. “Victor Storelli and other brokers are there to help move the cartons, to support and stabilize market demand.”
Making the Grade
When the Carton Council formed in 2009, recovered cartons didn’t have an official grade designation in ISRI’s Scrap Specifications Circular. Most recovered cartons ended up going to mills as mixed paper or found their way into loads of old corrugated containers or old newspapers, Storelli says. After consulting with the council and helping to develop a model to increase carton recycling in the United States, Storelli approached the specifications committee of ISRI’s Paper Stock Industries Chapter and proposed adding the following grade:
Aseptic Packaging and Gable-Top Cartons
Consists of liquid packaging board containers including empty, used, polyethylene (PE)-coated, printed one-side aseptic and gable-top cartons containing no less than 70 percent bleached chemical fiber and may contain up to 6 percent aluminum foil and 24 percent PE film.
Prohibitive materials may not exceed 2 percent.
Outthrows plus prohibitives may not exceed 5 percent.
ISRI adopted the above specification in April 2011, designating it as grade PS-52. The new specification distinguishes cartons from mixed paper and gives brokers the opportunity to market the material as a supplement to or replacement for sorted office paper, Frey says. Carton fiber is “very similar” to fiber from SOP and sorted white ledger, so most sellers “follow the SOP markets as a guide,” Storelli says. In recent years, “the value of [postconsumer cartons] has risen to about 70 to 75 percent of the value of SOP, rather than selling as mixed paper,” which has a lower price point, Frey notes. Nick Halper, a broker with The Paper Tigers (Bannockburn, Ill.), agrees that “basing the price of cartons on the market for SOP makes sense. I don’t think they’re always going to move in lock step, but it’s probably the best proxy there is for postconsumer carton pricing.”
Mills often seek to pay below the SOP price, however, because of the cartons’ nonfiber components—PE and aluminum—which they must remove, Storelli says. It’s also difficult to demand a higher price given the modest tonnage of collected cartons, he notes. As the volume grows, however, the price for recovered cartons could move “closer and closer to the SOP price,” Storelli says, suggesting that cartons eventually could reach or exceed SOP prices.
Pluses and Minuses
For mills, there are pros and cons to consuming recovered cartons. Fox River Fiber (De Pere, Wis.), a postconsumer deinked pulp mill, has recycled cartons for about a year, says Adam Kositzke, the company’s secondary fiber buyer, and it likes having “another postconsumer fiber not named SOP,” which is its primary feedstock. “Anything we can add to the supply side is a benefit. Our interest is in finding more postconsumer fiber sources because fiber generated through traditional office collection of coated and uncoated free sheet is becoming less and less available in the digital age.”
There are additional costs to carton recycling, however. Fox River, for instance, doesn’t have a “true poly removal system,” so it isn’t set up to use cartons in large volumes, Kositzke says. The mill also lacks a poly collection system, so it shoulders additional landfill costs to dispose of the material. Further, “we have to pulp the cartons separately from the SOP and other furnishes to properly de-poly the material,” he says. “We also have to use additional chemicals to effectively pulp the gable top, which contains wet-strength resins, and the material requires a longer pulping cycle.” Currently, poly cartons are about 3 percent of Fox River’s monthly intake of recovered paper, and the mill could take up to 12 percent with potential future upgrades to its current pulping configuration, Kositzke says. “Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of collections happening in the Midwest,” he says. As a result, the mill’s future consumption of cartons “will depend on how the Carton Council is able to increase the collection in the Midwest.”
Not all mills are convinced the fiber’s value offsets the additional costs. Tom Imming, a broker with Donco Recycling Solutions (Chicago), says his company’s Ohio Pulp Mills facility in Cincinnati doesn’t consume aseptic containers because of the foil content and because postconsumer cartons are “too dirty to use.” The company will broker the material “if we find homes for the grades,” he says.
China, the largest market for many grades of recovered paper, refuses to import cartons from the United States due to contamination concerns, Halper says. “We ship postindustrial poly-coated board into China, but nothing postconsumer,” he says. “There are definitely some concerns over the cleanliness of the material. [Chinese buyers] don’t want to take something that they think is like hazardous waste—sticky and smelly.” Quintano concurs that the material sometimes is “very gritty, very dirty.” Some brokers have had loads rejected in South Korea, he says, so they now require dated pictures of what the carton material looks like before they’ll take an order, then they want it shipped immediately. In the 60 days it can take the material to reach South Korea, the cartons can get moldy, and then buyers “don’t want anything to do with it,” he says.
Domestic mills generally won’t buy cartons from more than 200 miles away due to the cost of transportation compared with the value of the fiber, Quintano says, though Storelli adds that his company ships cartons as far as 800 miles to domestic consumers. In the same vein, the export market isn’t limited to that 200-mile radius because, as Halper explains, export freight “isn’t as expensive as shipping domestically. You can ship containers to China cheaper than you can send a truckload across the country, in many cases.” South Korea is the largest and most lucrative export market for this material, dwarfing North American consumption, Quintano says. Meanwhile, the 130 European mills that consume poly cartons have abundant domestic sources of supply and don’t need to import.
Room to Grow
Storelli estimates that the United States and Canada generate about 550,000 tons of postconsumer cartons in their waste streams. Currently, about 15 percent—82,500 tons—is reclaimed for recycling, though “some of that isn’t being separated from the mixed paper, news, or cardboard,” he says. That 15 percent figure shows how much room carton recycling has to grow.
Frey notes that the Carton Council has a “healthy sum of money” available for equipment grants that will assist MRF operators extracting the cartons from the commingled container and fiber streams. In smaller facilities, such equipment might only include an additional manual sort station and another silo. In larger facilities, automated, optical near-infrared sorting equipment can be added to sort the cartons automatically. The Carton Council is actively seeking MRFs that want to start recovering cartons. “One of our primary messages is that we want anybody interested to come and talk to us,” he says. “We initially targeted the large MRFs, and we’re working down to the medium-sized and smaller ones.”
Though Halper says recovered carton fiber never will be “as abundant as a deinking grade like SOP, even if you recover 100 percent of it,” he sees room for growth. For one, “any mill that can use postindustrial [carton] material can potentially use the postconsumer, too”—as long as it sets up its process to deal with the nonfiber contaminants. Such mills will “have to be able to dispose of the poly and aluminum cost-effectively,” he says, noting that some are exploring ways to recycle those contaminants at no cost or even at a profit, “subject to the markets for those materials.”
Ken McEntee is editor and publisher of The Paper Stock Report and Paper Recycling Online (www.recycle.cc).
Building Up Carton Recycling
Paper mills recycle postconsumer cartons into new paper products, but one manufacturer—The ReWall Co. (Des Moines, Iowa)—uses the material to make “green” building products such as wallboard and ceiling tiles. Cartons are “the perfect feedstock for us,” CEO David Phillips says, because the company’s process uses the whole container, including its fiber, polyethylene coating, and aluminum. “We shred it and press-melt it,” he says. “The polyethylene flows everywhere and becomes the binder that holds it all together.” That feature saves the company from using water, glue, or other chemicals in its production process, and any material it trims off during production goes back into the manufacturing line, “so we have zero waste,” he says.
The technology, developed in Slovakia, has been in use in Europe for years. Phillips and his business partner in the Czech Republic started eyeing the U.S. market four years ago. Thanks to the activities of the Carton Council of North America (Vernon Hills, Ill.), the two businessmen “saw that more carton recycling was coming online, so for a couple years we investigated the ability to source feedstock and our ability to make this new composite panel in the United States and sell it into the construction industry,” Phillips says. The partners finally jumped into the market, launching ReWall in September 2011. The company can consume about 5 tons of cartons a day, and it plans to triple its capacity by this July.
With ReWall providing an end-use market, Greenstar Recycling installed infrared sorting technology in July 2012 at its material recovery facility in Des Moines which allows it to recover cartons. The MRF now reclaims about 1 ton of postconsumer cartons a month. First Fiber Corp. of America (Philadelphia) supplies the balance of ReWall’s carton feedstock. ReWall sources its cartons within a 500-mile radius so builders who use its products can qualify for sustainability building credits under the Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design certification program, Phillips says.
ReWall is considering expanding into new locations, with Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., possible sites. “There’s more than enough feedstock available,” Phillips says. “Even though poly-coated cartons make up approximately 1 percent of the nation’s waste stream, that’s still a few million tons a year.”
Gable-top and aseptic container recycling has matured rapidly in recent years, thanks in part to U.S. manufacturers’ efforts to spur this material’s collection, separation, and consumption.