Every day, large quantities of milk and juice are consumed in schools across the country, so it’s a natural fit for schools to develop and implement school-based carton recycling programs. Recognizing the fast-growing pace of carton recycling, this year Keep America Beautiful created a special category for carton recycling in its popular annual competition called Recycle-Bowl.

In 2012, total U.S. bottled water consumption increased to 9.67 billion gallons, up from 9.1 billion gallons in 2011. In fact, 2012’s consumption growth was the strongest it has been in five years. In addition, per-capita consumption is up 5.3% in 2012, with every person in America drinking an average of 30.8 gallons of bottled water last year. Bottled water increased in absolute volume more than any other beverage category in the U.S.

The United States Air Force Academy Cadet Squadron 09 won the inaugural Great American Can Roundup contest by recycling a total of 4,166 beverage cans. Sponsored by the Can Manufacturers Institute, the GACR creates awareness of the environmental benefits of recycling cans.

Cartons are highly recyclable and are a growing commodity. In the first quarter of 2013, almost 1.8 million new households gained access to carton recycling, ensuring that over 50 million U.S. households now have access to carton recycling.

I recently read a report from Canadean about reusable beverage containers that really opened my eyes to the practice of reusing beverage bottles that I hadn’t much considered before.

The recycling of rigid plastics, excluding bottles, climbed 13% in 2011 to reach at least 934 million pounds for the year, and U.S. consumers with local access to recycle all non-bottle rigid plastics shot from 40% to 57% between 2011 and 2012, according to a pair of reports released today at the Plastics Recycling Conference.

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition, announces the successful completion of the soft launch phase of its How2Recycle recycling labeling system. In addition, major brand name Kellogg’s will be joining the 11 other leading companies already taking advantage of the How2Recycle Label, including Ampac, Costco Wholesale, General Mills and Minute Maid.

Klöckner Pentaplast’s line of SmartCycle post-consumer recycled content polyester films produced in North America has been granted a “Certificate of Verification” by NSF International, an independent, third party, not-for-profit organization. The certificate verifies the recycled content claims of kp’s line of SmartCycle polyester films produced in North America and allows customers who use these films to be confident that the PCR-content claim is true and valid.

National Bulk Equipment, Inc. introduces the ProductSaver® line of packaged product recovery systems. Scrutiny of the costs and causes of material loss within processing and packaging operations, and the continual pursuit of sustainability performance improvements have made a priority of the safe and efficient recovery of packaged product and packaging that may be off-spec, mis-labeled, overruns, unsafe, or for other reasons, unsalable.

More than 47.9 million U.S. households can now recycle cartons thanks to efforts led by the Carton Council, a group of carton manufacturers committed to reducing the environmental impact of cartons. This is an increase of 128% in just three years.