Dive Brief:
- About 2.5 million new households gained access to carton recycling options in 2025 due to new MRF partnerships, drop-off sites and education initiatives, according to a report from the Carton Council.
- About 63% of households across the country now have access to some kind of carton recycling program, compared to about 18% in 2009 when the Carton Council was founded, the group said. Educational outreach programs and improvements to municipal drop-off programs helped boost access in 2025, the Carton Council said.
- Grant-funded technology upgrades at Circular Services’ Austin, Texas, MRF helped expand access to about 500,000 residents starting in July. The ongoing rollout of Oregon’s extended producer responsibility for packaging program, also launched in July, boosted collection efforts in that state by 38% and added 627,000 households, The Carton Council said.
Dive Insight:
The push to expand carton recycling options, along with efforts to improve domestic recycling infrastructure and markets for the material, has gained momentum in recent years. The Carton Council aims to boost access as part of a broader goal to increase recycling rates for the material, which remain low in some areas.
The Carton Council is a coalition of food and beverage packaging manufacturers including Tetra Pak, Elopak and Novolex.
“At this stage, progress happens one program at a time,” said Jason Pelz, the Carton Council’s vice president of recycling, in a statement. “We’re working directly with local governments and material recovery facilities to update accepted material lists, optimize sortation, and ensure cartons enter recycling streams.”
Circular Services recently installed new equipment at its Austin MRF to better sort cartons and expand residential access to recycling for the material. Prior to that, “we did not have dedicated sortation to separate cups and cartons at our MRF and there hadn’t been consistent end markets for polycoated paper,” said Joaquin Mariel, Circular Services’ chief commercial officer, in an interview with Closed Loop Partners. The region now has access to more stable end markets for the material, he added.
In an Instagram post, Circular Services noted that the expansion was enabled by a grant from the Carton Council, the Foodservice Packaging Institute and the NextGen Consortium, a group of organizations working together under Closed Loop Partners to advance foodservice packaging recycling options.
Circular Services said the carton recycling upgrade aimed to meet the city’s goal to divert 90% of waste from disposal by 2040.
In 2023, FCC Environmental Services announced it had received a similar equipment grant provided by the same three organizations in order to better sort cartons and paper cups at its Dallas-area MRF.
Carton Council noted that municipal drop-off projects also helped boost carton collection in 2025. Marion County, Florida, upped its educational outreach when it implemented its county-side drop-off program, which Carton Council estimates serves about 127,000 households.
Titusville, Florida, updated its curbside recycling program to add cartons to its accepted materials list, which serves about 21,000 households.
Cedar Falls, Iowa, established a new drop-off program for about 16,000 households, while Robeson County, North Carolina, updated its program guidance to add cartons to drop-off programs serving about 35,000 households.
Though carton recycling access is growing more common, the material stream still faces collection and recycling market challenges.
A state law in California, SB 343, will govern whether a package can be considered “recyclable” when it goes into effect in October. It will require such materials to be collected by programs that cover at least 60% of the state population and must be sorted into a “defined stream” by facilities that serve at least 60% of recycling programs statewide.
In December, CalRecycle determined that just 53% of Californians had access to beverage carton recycling, which falls below the 60% access threshold the material would need to be considered recyclable under SB 343. That’s in part because WM announced it would pause carton sorting at its its Sacramento MRF due to “changes in market tolerance for the inclusion of materials like cartons in fiber bales.”
CalRecycle also noted that the recycling rate for cartons in the state was just 1%.
The Carton Council says there are several established markets for cartons in North America and overseas, including packaging companies like Sustana, Kimberly-Clark and Essity.
Another buyer is ReCB, a company that uses recycled cartons to produce a roofing material called Everboard. That company, which has a facility in Iowa and is planning to open a facility in Lodi, California, has gone through several owners, including WM. It closed for about nine months in 2024 before reopening in August 2025. The Carton Council supports the company’s projects.
This story first appeared in the Waste Dive: Recycling newsletter. Sign up for the weekly emails here.
