A Lahore girls school has shown what carton recycling can achieve when a whole school gets behind it. Crescent Model Girls High School collected 173 kilograms of used beverage cartons under the Tetra Pak Pakistan and WWF-Pakistan Recycling Awareness Project, earning the Central Region winner’s title and a set of furniture made from recycled cartons for its students.
Carton recycling: 12,110 cartons and one regional title
The school’s collection weighed 173 kilograms, the equivalent of approximately 12,110 used beverage cartons, the kind of juice and milk cartons that usually go straight into household waste. That total made Crescent Model Girls High School the winner for the Central Region in the project’s used beverage carton collection competition, ahead of schools across the region. The award was presented at a ceremony at the school on Thursday 29 October 2026, where the furniture made from recycled cartons was inaugurated with a ribbon-cutting.
Photo: Oscar Wai via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
A ceremony built around the students
The ceremony was designed as a lesson as much as a celebration. It included a recap of the school’s collection effort, a quiz conducted with Tetra Pak’s mascot, Captain Dubloo, and an educational mime performance on water conservation by senior students. Speaking at the event, Muhammad Bin Shahzad, Sustainability Manager at Tetra Pak Pakistan, said: “Today’s students are not just the leaders of tomorrow, they are also the change makers of today.” The furniture itself made the project’s point in physical form: cartons the students collected are processed and pressed into boards, which return to schools as desks and benches.
The project behind the prize
The Recycling Awareness Project is run by WWF-Pakistan’s Environmental Education Department with support from Tetra Pak Pakistan, and it has operated since 2017. Its record so far includes:
- 79 awareness sessions held for school students
- Six cities and towns covered: Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Wah Cantt and Khanpur in Rahim Yar Khan
- 47 schools taking part in the collection competition
- Regional winners rewarded with furniture manufactured from the recycled material
Carton recycling only works when cartons are collected separately, because a beverage carton combines paperboard with thin layers of plastic and aluminium that general waste streams cannot handle. Programmes like this one build the collection habit at the age when habits form, and WWF-Pakistan describes the project as part of its wider effort to integrate environmental awareness and sustainable waste management into Pakistan’s education system.
What happens to a collected carton
A used beverage carton looks like rubbish, but its materials are valuable. In recycling programmes of this kind, collected cartons are shredded and pulped with water so the paper fibre can be separated and reused, while the remaining plastic and aluminium mix is pressed under heat into tough boards. Those boards are what come back to schools as furniture and are also used for roofing sheets. That closed loop is the lesson the ceremony was built around: the students handled the finished furniture made from the same kind of cartons they had spent the year collecting, 173 kilograms of them, gathered carton by carton from homes and classrooms rather than bought or donated.
A national effort, not just one school
The Central Region title means Crescent Model’s students out-collected schools across their region in this year’s drive, one of several regional contests inside the wider project. With 47 schools taking part across six cities, the combined collection runs to many tonnes of cartons that would otherwise have gone to landfill, where the plastic and aluminium layers in each carton can take decades to break down. For the Lahore students, the prize is practical as well as symbolic: the recycled furniture now in daily use at their school is a permanent reminder of what their collection achieved.
Students leading on the environment
The Lahore result joins a run of student-led good news this autumn, from the two Pakistani students who won Rhodes Scholarships for 2027 to the country’s first $10 million clean-air startup fund, covered in our report on the clean-air fund to fight smog. Together they show environmental awareness moving through Pakistan’s classrooms at every level, from primary collections to university research. For Crescent Model Girls High School, the prize is also practical: new furniture, made from the very cartons its students gathered, now in daily use.
Sources
- Tetra Pak and WWF-Pakistan recognise Lahore school for carton recycling achievement, Lead Pakistan
- Tetra Pak, WWF-Pakistan honour Lahore school for carton recycling achievement, Pakistan Observer
- Photo: Oscar Wai via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.