Recycling for beverage packaging

The third area of analysis in the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership report “Towards sustainable packaging materials” is recycling.

These figures surprised me in 3 respects:

1 The current recycling rates for PET, aluminium cans and glass are all remarkably similar at around 70%.

2 The recycled content of aluminium cans at 35% and glass at 25% is lower than I expected.

3 There is no publicly available data on recycled content for cartons.

UK recycling for beverage packaging

Recycling rate

Recycled content

Source: CISL

The full findings show that increasing the recycled content of PET to a minimum 30% would make it far more competitive in perceptions with glass and cans unless they improve their rates too. Which I hope they will.