About two months ago, I wrote an article about an environmental dilemma in which I found myself – to buy local, organic juice packaged in Tetra Pak containers or imported, organic juice packaged in glass containers. In the end, I chose the glass-contained juice because I believed that the end-of-life management options, which included recycling the product locally, outweighed the environmental cost of importing the juice from across the country. The Tetra Paks, I found out, were being shipped halfway around the world to China and Korea for recycling. About a week or two after posting that article, I got an email from the Carton Council of Canada, defending Tetra Paks. I feel that its important to share the contents of the email, so everyone can benefit, and though I didn’t have time to earlier, today I’d like to respond to it because they did bring some interesting issues to light.
Tetra Pak – The Sequel
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My fiancee and I are having a green wedding. That means that we’re making conscious choices about the environmental impacts of every wedding-related decision we make, including what we provide to our guests. We decided not to provide soft drinks, but rather to provide a selection of healthier, organic juices. We went to the grocery store and found ourselves in a classic environmental dilemma, much like the ketchup bottle situation that Rick Smith found himself in when writing