Costa Rica recovered 1,671 tonnes of post-consumer beverage cartons in 2025.

That is an impressive number for a relatively small market.

According to figures reported by Tetra Pak, the country accounted for roughly 70% of the 2,370 tonnes the company says it helped collect and recycle across Central America and the Caribbean during the year. The corresponding reported volumes were 518 tonnes in the Dominican Republic, 102 tonnes in Panama and 79 tonnes in Guatemala.

But the most interesting part of Costa Rica’s carton-recycling story begins after those packages have been collected.

A beverage carton does not emerge from a recycling plant as one homogeneous material.

Most of it becomes paper fibre.

The rest becomes something much more difficult.

That distinction determines whether beverage-carton recycling becomes a genuinely circular material system or simply an effective way of recovering the easiest fraction.

Costa Rica’s next challenge is therefore not just collecting more cartons. It is creating enough economic value from everything inside them.

A beverage carton is fundamentally a materials-separation problem

The modern aseptic beverage carton is an impressive piece of packaging engineering.

Its paperboard provides stiffness and structure.

Thin polymer layers protect against moisture and help seal the package.

In aseptic formats, an aluminum layer provides an effective barrier against oxygen and light.

Tetra Pak describes a typical beverage carton as containing around 70% paperboard, 25% polymers and 5% aluminum, although the exact material structure varies by package.

Those different materials allow products such as milk and juice to remain protected through filling, transport, storage and consumption.

They also explain why the package is more complicated to recycle than an ordinary corrugated box.

The first stage is relatively well established.

Used cartons are fed into a hydrapulper with water. Mechanical agitation releases the cellulose fibres from the polymer and aluminum layers.

The recovered fibre can then return to papermaking applications.

Tetra Pak says recycled carton fibres are already being used in applications including boxes, paper products and egg cartons in Latin American recycling systems.

From a pulp-and-paper perspective, this is the easy part of the circularity argument.

Carton fibres are long, relatively strong fibres with potential value to paper manufacturers.

The difficult question concerns what remains after those fibres leave the pulper.

The last 30% matters more than its percentage suggests

The non-fibre fraction is generally referred to as polyaluminum, or PolyAl.

It contains the polyethylene and aluminum remaining after paper fibres have been separated.

Historically, this fraction has been one of the biggest obstacles to improving the economics of beverage-carton recycling.

If mills recover the valuable paper fibres but cannot find a commercially viable outlet for the remaining material, the recycling system is incomplete.

That is why developments around PolyAl deserve more attention than they usually receive.

Tetra Pak and recycling partners have been developing markets for PolyAl in products including roofing sheets, construction panels, furniture, flooring, pallets and other durable applications.

In Ecuador, for example, Tetra Pak reports that processors including Ecuaplastic convert recovered PolyAl into roofing sheets, wall panels, furniture and other products.

The material has even entered automotive applications.

Fiat’s Grande Panda incorporates a PolyAl-based compound manufactured by Lapo Compound in interior components. According to Tetra Pak, each vehicle uses material derived from the equivalent of approximately 140 post-consumer beverage cartons.

These applications matter because recycling only works economically when recovered material has somewhere to go.

Collection generates material.

Demand gives that material value.

Costa Rica has built the fibre side more locally than the PolyAl side

This is where Costa Rica’s system becomes particularly instructive.

The country has developed carton-recycling capacity in partnership with Empaque Santa Ana, allowing recovered fibres to be processed locally into paper and packaging products.

That creates an important domestic loop.

Used cartons enter the collection system.

The fibre fraction is separated.

That fibre becomes raw material for another manufacturing process.

But according to the information provided around the Costa Rican program, the PolyAl fraction is still sent to specialized processors in markets including Panama and Ecuador.

That does not mean the material is not being recycled.

It does mean the recycling chain is geographically incomplete.

And geography matters in recycling economics.

Moving relatively low-value secondary raw material between countries introduces transportation, consolidation and logistics costs.

If the market value of the recovered material falls, or freight costs rise, a route that works under one economic environment may become less attractive under another.

The durability of carton recycling therefore depends not merely on whether a technical process exists.

It depends on whether all recovered fractions can support commercially viable downstream markets.

That is why Angela Acosta’s observation that secondary materials need a market is more consequential than it may sound.

A recyclable material without a buyer is still a recycling problem.

Collection tonnage is not the same thing as circularity

This distinction matters when interpreting Costa Rica’s 1,671-tonne result.

The figure demonstrates that meaningful post-consumer recovery infrastructure is operating.

It does not tell us by itself:

what percentage of all beverage cartons placed on the Costa Rican market was recovered,

what proportion of fibre was successfully converted into new paper products,

what percentage of PolyAl ultimately became finished products,

or whether those secondary materials returned to packaging applications.

Those are different measurements.

For this reason, I would avoid describing 1,671 tonnes as proof that beverage cartons have achieved a closed loop in Costa Rica.

It is better understood as evidence that a functioning recycling value chain has been established and is handling meaningful volume.

That is already important.

But circularity asks a harder question.

Where does the recovered material go next?

And then what happens to it after that product reaches the end of its own life?

A carton transformed into construction board has avoided disposal and displaced some virgin raw material.

That is useful material recovery.

It is not necessarily carton-to-carton recycling.

The distinction should not diminish the achievement.

It should clarify what kind of circularity is actually being created.

The fibre has an established market. PolyAl needs more applications.

This difference in downstream demand helps explain why beverage-carton recycling economics are unusual.

Recovered paper already has a large global industrial market.

Containerboard mills.

Paperboard mills.

Tissue producers.

Other recycled-paper manufacturers.

Infrastructure already exists to turn secondary fibre into industrial products.

PolyAl does not have an equivalent commodity market of the same maturity.

Every new commercial application therefore matters disproportionately.

Roofing sheets are useful.

Furniture is useful.

Pallets are useful.

Automotive compounds are particularly interesting because they potentially move PolyAl into a higher-value manufacturing application.

But scaling those markets enough to absorb rising carton-recycling volumes is another question.

Tetra Pak reported 2,910 tonnes of post-consumer cartons collected and recycled in Ecuador during the most recent reporting period, 15% more than the previous year. Its recycling partners use recovered PolyAl in a growing portfolio of industrial products.

If carton collection continues increasing across Latin America, downstream PolyAl demand will have to expand with it.

Otherwise the system can eventually produce the very problem recycling was supposed to solve:

a secondary material stream with insufficient demand.

This is why Tetra Pak is also redesigning the carton itself

There is another route to solving the problem.

Instead of continually improving the recycling of a complex package, reduce its material complexity before it enters the market.

That is becoming a major part of Tetra Pak’s development strategy.

The company invested approximately €100 million in packaging research and development during 2025, according to its latest sustainability reporting.

One of the resulting technologies replaces the conventional aluminum foil barrier in an aseptic carton with a paper-based barrier.

Tetra Pak says the technology can increase the paper content of certain packages to approximately 80%. When combined with plant-based polymers, renewable content can reach as much as 92%.

That shift is important for recycling for a simple reason.

A package dominated by a material with an established recycling market should, in principle, be easier to recover economically than one containing larger quantities of several different materials.

But again, the qualification matters.

Tetra Pak’s paper-barrier technology is still moving through industrialization and scale-up.

The company announced a €60 million pilot plant in Lund, Sweden, in January 2026 to advance the technology and validate production at greater scale.

The future carton therefore may not simply be a package that is collected more effectively.

It may be one that gives recycling plants less material-separation work in the first place.

The 43% carbon claim also needs its boundary

Tetra Pak says a carton using its paper-based barrier together with plant-based polymers can have a carbon footprint up to 43% lower than the comparable aseptic package using an aluminum layer and fossil-based polymers.

That figure should be reported carefully.

It is not evidence that every paper-barrier carton has a 43% lower footprint than every conventional carton.

The comparison applies to specified package configurations and is based on Tetra Pak’s Carbon Trust-verified carton carbon-footprint model.

The material mix matters.

The use of plant-based polymers matters.

The package format matters.

And the geographic assumptions used in the model matter.

Those qualifications do not invalidate the result.

They prevent a specific carbon assessment from becoming a generic sustainability claim.

That level of precision will become increasingly important as packaging companies move from broad environmental messaging toward measurable design claims.

Design may matter more than recycling investment alone

There is a reason Tetra Pak is pursuing package redesign and recycling infrastructure simultaneously.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation frequently cites the principle that roughly 80% of a product’s environmental impact is influenced by decisions made during the design stage.

For packaging, that means the recycling problem begins before the package exists.

Material selection determines whether the package can be separated.

Layer structure determines what recycling equipment has to do.

Barrier choice influences what secondary streams emerge from the process.

And the value of those streams affects whether recyclers have an economic reason to process the package.

This is a useful lesson from the Costa Rican example.

Investment in collection is essential.

So is hydrapulping capacity.

But the strongest recycling system is one in which package design and recycling infrastructure evolve together.

Tetra Pak itself is investing on both sides.

Alongside its approximately €100 million spent on packaging R&D in 2025, the company says it invested another €42 million in collection and recycling infrastructure globally.

That may ultimately be a more realistic model for packaging circularity than focusing solely on collection targets.

Designing out aluminum does not eliminate every recycling problem

It would also be premature to conclude that replacing aluminum solves beverage-carton circularity.

Even a paper-barrier package still contains polymers.

Those polymers perform necessary functions.

They protect the fibre.

Create seals.

Prevent liquid from reaching the paperboard.

And help maintain food safety.

Tetra Pak’s long-term development direction is therefore not simply “make the carton out of paper.”

It is to increase paper and renewable content while maintaining the performance required of an aseptic food package.

That is a much more difficult engineering task.

Food packaging must first protect food.

A carton with excellent recyclability but inadequate barrier performance could increase spoilage.

And food waste can carry an environmental cost considerably larger than the packaging surrounding it.

So the relevant objective is not maximum paper content at any cost.

It is the simplest material structure capable of safely delivering the required shelf life.

That principle applies far beyond beverage cartons.

Costa Rica’s numbers should be viewed in regional context carefully

Costa Rica’s reported 1,671 tonnes is substantially higher than the figures reported for the other markets included in Tetra Pak’s Central America and Caribbean update.

That clearly places it at the front of the countries covered by those reported numbers.

But I would avoid turning that into a broader claim that Costa Rica has definitively achieved the highest beverage-carton recycling rate in all of Latin America or even across every Central American market.

Tonnage and recycling rate are different measures.

A larger collection volume can reflect:

higher consumption,

better collection,

more effective industrial partnerships,

or a combination of all three.

Without comparable data showing cartons placed on market in each country, the 1,671-tonne figure does not establish a recycling percentage.

This is an important E-E-A-T distinction.

Volume tells us how much material moved through the system. Rate tells us how much of the available material the system captured.

Both matter.

They answer different questions.

Costa Rica may be showing what smaller markets need most: industrial partners

The significance of Costa Rica’s progress may therefore lie less in the tonnage itself than in the infrastructure behind it.

Recycling systems require several parties to work simultaneously.

Consumers and businesses have to separate material.

Collectors need enough volume to justify aggregation.

Sorting operations have to keep the material reasonably clean.

Paper processors require equipment capable of recovering the fibre.

And someone must buy both the fibre and the residual PolyAl.

If any link disappears, the package may remain technically recyclable while becoming economically unrecyclable.

The partnership with Empaque Santa Ana addresses one of the most important pieces of that equation:

local demand for recovered fibre.

The cross-border movement of PolyAl shows that another piece remains more regional.

Neither should be ignored.

In fact, the existence of both tells us more about real recycling than a recyclability logo ever could.

The next milestone is not another collection record

Costa Rica can reasonably point to 1,671 tonnes of beverage cartons entering recycling channels in 2025.

But the industry’s next target should be more ambitious than simply raising that number.

The questions worth measuring now are:

How much of the carton becomes saleable recovered fibre?

How much PolyAl is recovered?

How far does each fraction travel before processing?

What products do they become?

What is the market value of those outputs?

And can those markets absorb substantially larger volumes if collection doubles?

These are commercial questions.

That is precisely why they matter.

Circularity ultimately fails when the economics disappear.

A recycling plant can separate fibre from PolyAl perfectly, but if nobody wants the PolyAl, the technological success has not solved the material problem.

Likewise, a highly recyclable carton achieves little if collection systems cannot supply enough clean material to keep recycling equipment operating economically.

Costa Rica’s 2025 result shows that beverage-carton recycling can reach meaningful scale in a relatively small market.

The more consequential lesson is what happens after collection.

The recovered fibre already has something every circular material needs:

a buyer.

Now beverage-carton recycling has to make sure the remaining material can consistently say the same.

That is when 1,671 tonnes becomes more than a recycling statistic.

It becomes an industrial raw-material system.

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Last Updated on 14/09/2026 by Jota Machinery