Tetra Pak: Going beyond recycling

AS GLOBAL food and drink markets continue to grow exponentially, pressure is mounting on the natural resources used to produce and distribute products – water, fuel, land, to name a few – often resulting in increased costs and squeezed margins for manufacturers. In the Middle East alone, the market for carton packaged dairy beverages and fruit-based drinks is expected to grow from 8.3 billion litres in 2010 to 10.6 in 2013 due to a rising middle class and increasing demand for the convenience of packaged drinks.

Increasingly, the industry as a whole is having to ‘do more with less’ in order to maintain profitability and long term growth. Yet, the challenges of doing more with less are not insurmountable if sustainability is built into the heart of business strategy and embedded throughout the production and packaging process.

For beverage packaging, becoming more environmentally sustainable has often meant focusing on recyclability. But today the story of environmental innovation goes beyond recycling. We must look upstream to the sustainability and renewability of the raw materials that go into the production of the package, not only what happens at end of life.

For us the message is clear: We must accelerate product innovation to develop more environmentally sustainable packages that offer the convenience and quality of traditional packaging at a competitive cost. Therefore, our R&D efforts are focused on developing processing and packaging solutions with lower environmental impact at competitive prices so that customers can offer good products that consumers can afford.

Tetra Pak has adopted a three-pronged approach to further improve the environmental performance of our packaging:

- Increase renewable content– Develop a fully renewable carton package and increase the supply of FSC-certified paperboard used in Tetra Pak products

- Cap climate impact – Despite an estimated 5% compound annual growth rate by 2020, we aim to limit emissions of greenhouse gases across the entire value chain (suppliers, our operations, equipment at our customers, end-of-life) at 2010 levels

- Increase reNike Fingertrap Air Max