— By Plasteurope.com staff — 

Discounter Aldi is about to put its Rio d’oro grape juice onto the market in parts of Germany in an aluminium-free cardboard pack. The aseptic packs stem from Swiss company SIG Combibloc (Neuhausen; www.sig.biz) and are filled by Italy’s Quargentan. SIG did not provide details about the planned sales quantities in response to a Plasteurope.com query.

“Our aim is to increase the paper content of our carton packs by 2030 to at least 90% – including the closure,” said José Matthijsse, president and general manager Europe at SIG. Until now, the paper content has averaged 75% in a standard pack of cardboard/aluminium and polyethylene.

The SIG Terra Alu-free + Full Barrier material used by Aldi was an intermediate solution towards this target. It consists of more than 80% paper, with the remainder being PE.

Together with Swedish company PulPac (Västra Frölunda; www.pulpac.com), SIG is also working on paper-based closures for aseptic packaging – based on the Dry Moulded Fibre technology.

Related: SIG’s carton packaging grows as bag-in-box, stand-up pouches weaken

In 2010, SIG became the first supplier to bring a packaging material for carton packs onto the market without the otherwise usual aluminium layer – but only for milk. Since then, more than 4 bn such packs have been sold worldwide.

Products such as fruit juices and vegetable drinks are now also to be sold in aluminium-free packaging with the SIG barrier material, with a shelf life of up to 12 months. According to SIG, the carbon footprint of the carton is 29% lower than the aluminium version.

Related: Tetra Pak expands beverage carton recycling in the Netherlands

In Germany, aseptic beverage cartons are disposed of in the yellow household waste collection bags and bins – provided they do not end up in the residual waste bins. The country’s dual waste system passes the cartons on to paper mills, which separate the paper fibres from the plastics and aluminium. Palurec (Hürth, Germany; www.palurec.com) and Saperatec (Dessau-Roßlau, Germany; www.saperatec.de) operate plants that recycle the remaining plastics-aluminium residues.

According to Germany’s central agency packaging register ZSVR (Osnabrück; www.verpackungsregister.org), the recycling quota of beverage cartons was most recently 8.7 percentage points below the target of 80%. The agency said the main reason is a lack of recycling capacities.

Criticism of the official statistics comes from environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH, Berlin; www.duh.de). It says that recycling quotas take into account only the volumes collected by the dual systems. Experts estimate that up to a third of the beverage cartons in Germany end up in the residual waste and are thus incinerated. The actual recycling quota is correspondingly lower, according to DUH.

— Translated by Jon Relton