The Recycling Dilemma: Good Plastic, Bad plastic? (ecowatch.com)
"As far as recyclability is concerned, the plastic bottle is probably slightly better because it is likely only made from one plastic, and so is easier to recycle than a multilayer material like a beverage carton," says Rolf Buschmann, waste and resource expert with the German environmental organization BUND, who worked on the group's 2019 Plastic Atlas. He explains that only the paper part of the drink carton would be recycled — everything else, including the plastic coating or layer or aluminum foil, would be incinerated as residual waste. "In recent years there's been a trend toward so-called multilayer packaging, which is extremely light and thin. It saves material as well as CO2 emissions during transport, but can't be recycled," Christiani says. Because it is not possible to melt the different plastics together, or — at least for now — to separate the individual films from one another at recycling plants. A 2017 cyclos-HTP study into the recyclability of conventional packaging waste concluded that a third of it was not recyclable, and only 40% of the remaining two-thirds was made into plastic recyclate. The rest was used as fuel — in other words it was incinerated. click read more below for more of the story