Partners to Make Building Materials from Food and Beverage Cartons

The Carton Council and industry partners have joined forces to transform post-consumer food and beverage cartons into sustainable building materials. The trade organization, along with Upcycling Group and Elof Hansson, plan to launch a facility on the West Coast in mid- 2025 they say could turn 9,000 tons a year of this packaging into products like roof cover board, interior wallboard, and exterior sheathing.

“We found this business venture to be a great opportunity to maximize the value of food and beverage cartons at the end of life. That’s because this recycling process makes use of the whole carton. Because of how they are made they contain all the substrates needed to make the boards,” says Jason Pelz, vice president of sustainability for Tetra Pak –  U.S. and Canada and vice president of recycling for Carton Council. Tetra Pak makes aseptic and gable-top food and beverage packaging and is a founding member of the Carton Council.

This new project follows similar ventures that Tetra Pak and the Council have supported to recover more cartons while helping to meet intensifying demand for sustainable building products.  So, joining forces to take the work further felt like a natural fit, Pelz says.

It turns out that engineering cartons to be able to protect food comes with an unanticipated capability: providing all the attributes needed for the material to live on in building applications.

“The materials in beverage cartons—fiber, low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and, in the case of aseptic cartons, aluminum— offer just the right structural and barrier properties to make a high-performance building material,” says Jan Rayman, CEO of Upcycling Group, which develops and runs recycling facilities.

Fiber provides strength and contributes to sound and thermal insulation performance; aluminum adds heat reflectivity, and LDPE serves as a water-resistant binder, eliminating the need for glues and other chemicals used in traditional building products.

Being able to tap into these and other unique characteristics is opening opportunities for multiple customized applications. Sometimes the boards can be combined with, or replace, gypsum drywall, plywood, and cement board, among emissions-spewing construction materials.

The process uses no water, requires no mining or tree cutting, and in the absence of chemical additives emits no volatile organic compounds, according to Rayman.

“When combining these features with the fact that we are turning locally collected waste into locally distributed products, the carbon footprint of our boards is at least 80 percent lower than the traditional building materials that we replace,” he says.

The technology, which involves shredding and hot pressing the cartons into boards, is not brand new. Some progressive building industry players have relied on it for a few years as they grapple to cut their expansive carbon footprint at a time that they meet rocketing demand for new construction. By industry accounts, construction waste is expected to reach 2.2 billion tons globally each year by 2025. And in the U.S., spent C&D materials already make up about 23 percent of the waste stream.

Through its part, Carton Council has helped move the technology along by providing grants to companies like Continuus Materials in Iowa and Kelly Green Products in Connecticut who make sustainable building products from end-of-life materials. Now the trade group is fronting funding to get this new West Coast facility off the ground.

Industrywide, about 1.3 million tons of carton packages were collected and sent for recycling in 2023, representing a global recovery rate of 27 percent. While the built environment is starting to show interest in this alternative feedstock, most of it is transformed into paper products for the likes of Sustana, Kimberly-Clark, Essity Tissue, and other major paper and fiber producers. They find the material to be a good replacement for paper grades that have diminished over time.

Tetra Pak has networked worldwide to get its packaging recycled, having invested just over $44 million globally in 2023 alone. 

Besides carton-to-building projects in Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia, the carton maker has supported other recycling project types in every continent but Antarctica. Among them is a pulping line in Mexico that will be able to process 24,000 tons of cartons annually to make liner paper for corrugated boxes. It’s invested in infrastructure in Poland that could potentially triple the country's carton processing capacity, according to Pelz. And in the Netherlands Tetra Pak is helping advance recycling of polyAl from cartons to replace virgin plastic – as well as turning cartons into 3D-printed furniture.

Scaling takes work, with one of the biggest challenges being getting ahold of enough consistent material. Materials recovery facilities (MRFs) need a committed buyer before they invest in sorting, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

Carton Council has been doing well to convince cities and their waste management partners that there is a viable end market to justify adding cartons to their single-stream recycling programs.

Today, collection rates are climbing, and the availability of this feedstock is on workable levels, which will presumably continue to grow, project Rayman and Pelz.   

But there is more to iron out, with one challenge being getting more buy in from the construction industry, which tends to be conservative and slow to adopt new products.

So, the partners had to forget about charging a “green premium,” and compete on quality, high performance, and price parity with traditional products.

Even then, Rayman says it can take years to “teach” the market about the product’s performance ability and environmental benefits.

Elof Hansson USA, the principal investor and majority shareholder, will be the exclusive off-take partner for the new facility and future plants the partners hope to build in the U.S.  

For now, the search is on for long-term supply agreements with MRFs in California and surrounding states. The partners embark on this journey with high hopes.

Says Rayman: “Our goal for the California facility is to give second life to every used beverage carton that gets collected in the Southwest U.S.”