Sir, - I wish to congratulate your correspondent Eileen Battersby on her recent interview with Karin Dubsky (The Irish Times, July 6th). I have known Ms Dubsky for many years and have admired the tireless way in which she has battled to raise awareness among Irish people of the need to protect and manage our coastal resources. Her work with Coastwatch has become synonymous with the EU Bathing Waters Directive. Its relatively successful implementation throughout the EU is entirely due to this organisation and to Karin's efforts.
Permit me, though, to comment on some views Ms Dubsky expressed about packaging and to recycling of milk cartons. It is certainly true that the average milk carton that is now delivered to most people's door is made from a number of materials. The predominant material, though, is actually paperboard (80 per cent) produced from a renewable resource - timber - sourced from Scandinavian forests. A layer of Polyethylene (PE) is used to provide a leak-proof barrier and to ensure compliance with appropriate hygiene and food safety standards. For aseptic cartons (those used for juices and soups, for example) the cartons also have a thin layer of aluminium foil about 6.5 microns thick or the width of a human hair.
The recycling of milk cartons and other fibre-based cartons is being accomplished quite easily in a number of countries, often in pulp mills. This is the case in Norway, Sweden, Germany and France, for example. The relative amounts of PE and aluminium are small and capable of being dealt with by the re-pulping process. The "reject" from this process (the waste PE and aluminium) is usually recovered and used as a fuel, often for providing power to the pulp plant itself.
Recycling of beverage cartons has proven viable in most countries where there has been a serious commitment to household segregation of waste and where there is a degree of consensus amongst the stakeholders (government, industry, NGOs and public alike) on how to organise an efficient and workable system for material collection and segregation. Sadly, this is not the case in Ireland.
On the question of products being seriously over-packaged, the following should be borne in mind. In relation to the product that it contains, the milk carton, for example, makes up only about 3 per cent of the total weight of the product - there is no over-packaging. Packing of products is in fact always optimised taking account of the intrinsic nature of the product, the means of distribution and eventual sale. The popular belief, reflected in Karin's opinion, is that there is a rising mountain of packaging waste. This is not so. According to recent data from the Association for Sustainable Use and Recovery of Resources in Europe (ASSURE), the amount of packaging going to final disposal has decreased by 35 per cent between 1990 and 1997 (in those member-states where data is available) and the level of packaging entering the market is actually stabilising. In Germany, for example, total packaging consumption has decreased by 9.6 per cent and the amount of sales packaging has declined by 75 per cent.
The Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE) is striving to improve awareness of the positive benefits of packaging in terms of reducing or preventing environmental impacts. The reality is that almost 63 per cent of all intra-EU trade depends on packaging of one sort or another. What we have to do is to ensure that it continues to be optimal, safe and efficient in terms of use of resources. At the same time, regulators must seriously address the issue of improving recovery programmes for used packaging. Recent EPA reports show there is significant room for improvement in this area in Ireland. - Yours, etc.,
Dr Kevin Bradley, Director General, Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE), Brussels.