The School Recycling Programme helps schoolchildren develop good habits of handling used cartons for recycling instead of throwing them away. — Photo Tetra Pak

School Recycling, a programme on classifying, segregating and recycling used cartons, will be expanded to twice as many schools as in the previous year, benefitting 1,600 primary schools and kindergartens in Ha Noi.

The programme will be implemented by Swedish food processing and packaging solutions provider Tetra Pak and Ha Noi’s education and training, environment and natural resources departments during the 2020-21 school year.

“The programme expansion manifests our commitment to eliminating the environmental footprint of cartons that are already more sustainable than other packaging alternatives, of which 75 per cent are renewable and FSC-certified material,” said Ms. Ly Quynh Trang, Director of Sustainability, Tetra Pak Vietnam.

Launched in 2017, the School Recycling Programme was successfully implemented in 18 districts in HCM City and 19 districts in Ha Noi, with the participation of approximately 1,200 schools in the previous school year. Conducting more than 20 training seminars, it attracted the attention of nearly 3,000 teachers and the participation of more than 800,000 pupils in HCM City and Ha Noi.

Although the used beverage carton collection programme suffered a nearly half-year discontinuity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the total volume of cartons collected reached up to 269 tonnes, equivalent to roughly 27 million cartons.

Participating in this year’s programme, schoolchildren continue to be instructed on the simple steps of unfolding the four corners of used cartons, flattening them, sticking covers on carton openings and placing them into dustbins for collection. The used packages are then collected every two weeks by Lagom and transported to Dong Tien Paper Factory to become materials for useful products such as notebooks and bio-roof panels.

Apart from the School Recycling Programme, Tetra Pak is actively engaged with community organisations to establish and expand its chain of 56 public drop-off stations so that consumers can bring their used cartons for collection and recycling.

Following the programme expansion in Ha Noi, School Recycling will continue to be deployed in other provinces and cities, of which Da Nang will be the programme’s first destination in the central region of Viet Nam. — VNS