Turning Tetra trash into treasure

(and how you can you play your part)

by Virginia McMillan, Sustainable Matamata committee member

Virginia with cartons from local cafes and a flattened, cleaned carton

“Do you use soy milk, almond milk, or any other beverages from cartons?” I asked one of our committee members.

“No, I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said – meaning, he keeps his packaging use to the barest minimum.

Well done! But many people, myself included, buy alternative milks, or longlife dairy milk or fruit juice, or order oat-milk lattes when at a café.

If you're an alternative milk drinker, have you thought about the packaging involved? Tetra Paks are among the most-used packaging for long-life liquid consumables and cannot be put out for recycling once finished with.

What should we do with the empty cartons?

In Matamata, these cartons (often branded Tetra Pak) can be recycled – but NOT in the Matamata-Piako District Council recycling bins. And NOT in their original shape. They must be cut open, flattened and cleaned first. It doesn’t add a lot to your dishwashing routine.

How to flatten and clean food and beverage cartons

Already some keen local people drop off their cleaned packs in Hamilton for recycling, or to a private Sustainable Matamata location for temporary storage. This is how we supply saveBOARD, the Hamilton company that turns Tetra Pak-type food and beverage cartons into boards for use as interior cladding or exterior hoardings.

Interior design with saveBOARD boards

Cafés in support

Because this packaging cannot be put out for recycling once finished with, our local cafés have been forced to throw out the used ones with landfill-bound general waste. But in recent years, Sustainable Matamata has stepped in, taking thousands of cartons out of this waste stream through our café scheme, 'Adopt-a-Café'. Cafés can use five, 10 or 40 cartons a week and we’re rapt to have partner cafés that keep them for us rather than chuck them for landfill disposal. Our volunteers collect, open, wash and stack cafes’ used cartons, and deliver them to saveBOARD in Hamilton for upcycling into construction materials.

The saveBOARD team runs high-spec machinery through exacting processes to create their wallboards. Tetra Pak is a saveBOARD owner and Woolworths, a significant ally.

You may know that at the entrance to Woolworths Matamata you can find a special bin where anyone can drop off clean, used soft plastics such as bread bags. These, as well as cartons, are needed to produce the boards. Talk about trash to treasure!

If it has a logo like this, Woolworths has the bin for it!

Get on the bandwagon

Sustainable Matamata would love more people to cut and wash their packs at home.

We have had interest from a local business to provide a drop-off point for cleaned, flattened packs from the general public. It’s heartening that business people support their community and the environment and want to reduce the amount of waste trucked to landfill.

Can you help grow this project?

Since we started in October 2024, we have dropped off 5,500 packs to saveBOARD. We know there are plenty more where those came from.

The district council will support us in our expansion efforts – another sign we are on the right track.

To grow this project, more volunteers are needed to each adopt a local cafe and collect and process their cartons once a week.

If you would like to help:

• Email waste@sustainablematamata.org. We can discuss over a cuppa (decaf soy mochaccino, in my case).
  

• To start processing your own packs at home, follow the diagram provided above. Then, when you have a cupboard full, email us to find out where to drop them locally. Or, when visiting Hamilton, do your own drop-off to the bin outside saveBOARD’s factory at 30 Sunshine Avenue, Te Rapa.
  

Remember, they need your used soft plastic bags too. Rinse, dry and keep these for Woolworths!

Thank you.

Hats off to the local cafés supporting our beverage carton recycling:

• 64 Coffee & Kitchen

• Espresso To Go

• Merchant of Matamata

• Momento Espresso Café

• O-del-emz Café

• Rich Coffee Café

• Ronnies Café and Bakery

• The Coffee Gallery

For more inspiration, check out one of our favourite waste champions, Waste-Ed With Kate, on YouTube: How Food and Beverage Cartons are Recycled in New Zealand!