Beverage cartons have become an inevitable part of the modern lifestyle as they are used to hold milk, juices, and coconut water. After use, the cartons often become a part of the mountain of waste that India annually generates. A group of sustainability champions has found a new use for discarded Tetra Pak cartons—turn them into school benches and desks for pupils. On a hopeful note, within six months of the initiative being launched in Pune, one lakh cartons were collected. These add up to 800 kg of waste being saved from landfills. You can see collection bins at 10 Reliance Smart Superstores and Dorabjee's Balewadi High Street and Koregaon Park outlets. This is the Go Green with Tetra Pak initiative, named after Tetra Pak India, which is the manufacturer of most of these cartons in the country, and organisations, such as Reliance Smart Superstores and Mumbai-based RUR Green Life, that have partnered with ProEarth Ecosystems, a Pune-based carbon-negative social enterprise, for this project. The project started in Mumbai in 2010 and has collected 25 million cartons that have been turned into 1,000 school desks. “Around 10,000 cartons make one school bench for two students. We have been talking to housing societies, schools, and corporations. Recently, we started to discuss cafes and restaurants. We are trying to get all these people to not put their cartons in the regular waste bin, but keep them aside. We collect these, convert these into boards through a Pune-based recycler and, then, make school benches. The benches are sustainable and durable in the classrooms,” says Anil Gokarn, Founder and Director, ProEarth. A Tetra Pak carton is made of paper, aluminium, and plastic. The composite material is, generally, difficult to recycle if it is simply put in the waste bin. “It needs a proper channel and process to manage it and convert it,” says Gokarn. There are 11 public collection centres, partnerships with an outlet of an international coffee chain and a Pune-based grocery store and supermarket, and outreach programmes, such as workshops, with corporates and housing complexes. “The bulk generation of this material happens in IT companies and corporates, where there are a lot of pantries and floor-level coffee machines, these automated coffee machines. Generally, the milk supply comes in Tera Paks only. Large IT companies generate a lot of these cartons. Several companies are already recycling and are sending us beverage cartons every month,” says Gokarn. “We started this initiative in 2010, when recycling was not a buzzword, because cartons are paper-based and should be fully recycled. It makes sense to send it to the right recycler so that it can be fully recycled into composite sheets,” says Monisha Narke, Founder and CEO, RUR Green Life Pvt Ltd.
