Waste Management Wants You To Not Waste Juice And Milk Cartons

Illustration: The Carton Council

Finally, those paper juice cartons that seem to fit somewhere in your recycling — but you never know quite where because they don’t fit with either the plastic milk jugs or the catalogs and newspapers — will have ordained passage to a recycling facility.

Waste Management in conjunction with Tropicana has announced that it will be taking in juice, milk, soy milk and other paper cartons in for recycling. Just throw them in your mixed-collection bin or together with your sorted bottles for recycling and they’ll sort them out at the plant.

Tropicana, a division of Pepsico, issued a statement saying it is “dedicated to minimizing its impact on the earth and making it easier for consumers to do their part through recycling and waste reduction initiatives.”

WM reported that the carton collection initiative is part of its effort to more than double the recycling it collects, raising it from 8 million tons today to 20 million by 2020.

Juice and milk cartons can be reused through a process called “hydropulping”, which recovers paper fibers that can be re-processed and turned into tissue, paper towels and other paper products. (So look for recycled paper towels and tissues!)