One Carton, Two Lives: How Punjab Is Turning Milk Packs into School Furniture

Every morning, in thousands of classrooms across Punjab, a small carton of milk changes a child's day. What happens to that same carton after the last sip is poured out is a story that has, until now, stayed largely in the background even though it may be one of the most quietly ambitious parts of the entire program.

Under the Chief Minister Punjab School Meal Program, 8,319 schools across 13 districts of South Punjab including Bahawalnagar, Kot Addu, Bhakkar, Layyah, Mianwali, Muzaffargarh, Rahim Yar Khan, Rajanpur, Taunsa, Chiniot, Lodhran and Vehari now receive daily nutrition support. So far, 33.7 million milk cartons and 12.2 million packets of biscuits have reached students, while enrolment in participating schools has climbed by 28 percent, with an addition of 24,740 students.

Those numbers tell the nutrition story. But there is a second story hidden inside every one of those 33.7 million cartons, a story about where the packaging goes once its job of protecting the milk is done.

According to program details, roughly 1.2 million milk packs are collected every day from participating schools in South Punjab, where children in grades one through five are taught to rinse their empty cartons and store them in zip-lock bags rather than throw them away. It is a small, deliberate habit, and it is the first link in a recovery chain that is expected to draw in approximately 13 million cartons every month under the Green Punjab framework.

From there, the cartons travel to a recycling facility, where the process is almost industrial in its precision. The packaging, made of layered paper, polyethylene and aluminium, is first separated into what recyclers call "poly-Al" material. It is then shredded into smaller pieces, passed through a separator and composed of a stage where the material is melted and prepared for an entirely new purpose. Finally, it is pressed into dense recycled lumber boards.

That lumber does not sit in a warehouse. It is transformed into school benches and other classroom furniture to be used in the very schools from where the milk cartons were collected.

The recycled school furniture is resistant to weather conditions, unaffected by water, stronger than conventional wood furniture and designed to last between 20 and 25 years. It is also a cost-effective solution for schools.

Nearly 2.5 lakh pencils, copybooks and benches have already been produced this way and returned to the very schools the milk once came from, meaning a child's carton can, months later, literally become the desk another child sits at.

What makes this program distinctive is that the same packaging has been designed into a second act, one that turns a used carton into classroom infrastructure rather than landfill waste.

That lesson is arguably as valuable as the nutrition itself. Children are not just being fed; they are being shown, in a very literal way, what responsible resource use looks like by sorting, saving and returning material so it can be rebuilt into something useful again.

The program is not standing still. Phase II was recently inaugurated by the Punjab Food Authority in partnership with the Labour & Human Resources Department extending nutritious meals to 14,100 students across 36 schools, 30 government primary schools and six Worker Welfare institutions with a further 73 Labour Welfare schools under consideration. Awareness on balanced diets is also being extended to 40 million students in public and private schools across the province, alongside newly formed Nutrition Coordination Committees tasked with monitoring outcomes school by school.

Delivering nutritious meals is only part of the story. Around the world, the success of school meal program s is measured through evidence, not distribution figures alone. Four indicators are commonly used to assess impact: improvements in children's nutritional status, school enrolment, classroom attendance and product acceptability. Together, these measures help determine whether a program is genuinely improving children's lives.

For Pakistan, monitoring children's height and weight is particularly important given the country's burden of malnutrition. Evidence from school feeding program s has shown encouraging results, with targeted schools recording an average 6-centimetre increase in height and a 2.8-kilogram gain in weight, compared with 5.1 centimetres and 1.9 kilograms among children in control schools. Similar improvements have also been documented in Vietnam.

Education indicators tell a similarly positive story. In Myanmar, school enrolment in participating schools increased by 2.5 percent, compared with just 0.1 percent in control schools, while Kenya recorded substantially higher enrolment in schools participating in feeding program s. Classroom attendance has also improved significantly. In Bangladesh's Jamalpur district, attendance rose from 43 percent to 82 percent, while Zambia recorded a 7.6 percent increase in attendance alongside a sharp decline in early school dropouts.

Another important measure is whether children actually consume the food being provided. Surveys conducted across school feeding program s have consistently reported milk acceptance rates above 90 percent, demonstrating that dairy-based nutrition is both practical and widely accepted by students.

Programs like this are usually measured in liters of milk delivered or percentage points of attendance gained. Punjab's model asks a further question: what happens to everything that nutrition leaves behind?

Here, the answer is a bench in a rural classroom, a desk that will outlast the child who first drank from the carton it was made of, and a generation of students learning one zip-lock bag at a time that packaging does not have to end where its first use does.

A program that begins by nourishing a child and returns, months later, to give that same child better infrastructure to learn in is not simply a feeding scheme. It is a circular one.