Juicing the Waste Stream

If there’s juice in your child’s school backpack, it’s more than likely that it’s stored in a paper-and-foil aseptic package, complete with a colorful cartoon logo. Although aseptic packaging was invented to safely ship foods without refrigeration—a feature that has helped feed many people in the developing world—it is more familiarly used in the U.S. for convenience drinks. And while some environmentalists applaud the merits of aseptics, a number of important questions remain.


The first tenet of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra is that if we produce less waste to begin with, we’ve already won part of the garbage battle. Aseptic boxes were conceived, in part, to fit this bill. They are about 96 percent beverage to four percent packaging by weight, which is lower than glass or aluminum cans, according to the Aseptic Packaging Council (APC). The boxes are filled in a sterile environment through a process that uses less energy than traditional canning, preserves many food nutrients and requires few to no preservatives. As Sue Becker, vice president of Eden Foods, puts it, “Aseptics really protect the integrity of food.”

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