By Karen Hanna
At a time when legislatures are considering material bans and strategies to expand recycling, discussions around plastics packaging have never been thornier.
To describe plastics packaging’s relationship with consumers and brand owners using a phrase made popular by Facebook’s status updates: “It’s complicated.”
One person on the front lines of what he and others characterize as a “war on plastics” is Scot Case, an executive at the National Retail Federation. He’s seen brand owners, retailers and consumers grapple with what sustainability means. As experts who have pondered packaging acknowledge, the questions go beyond just material or format, to issues about infrastructure, recycling, even food availability and freshness.
“The question is, what is it you’re trying to optimize? And if consumers are choosing to optimize carbon footprint, you might get a different set of solutions than if consumers are trying to optimize single-use plastics,” said Case, the VP of corporate social responsibility and sustainability for NRF, the world’s largest retail trade association.
“The challenge is, if anyone looks at sustainability very narrowly, defining it in a way that only looks at one or two environmental or social impacts, you come up with a very different answer than if you try and take a more holistic approach. And the challenge is consumers are fickle. What’s important one day might not be important on another day.”
Mixed bag
Single-use packaging also stirs mixed emotions in retired plastics engineer Laura Martin, who devoted part of her career to helping a major machine manufacturer develop its mold-making business for PET bottles.
Having lived near the spring that provided the water for some of the bottles, she regrets that the commodity became so popular.
“They have nice fresh spring water in that area, so, they were pumping water out of the ground, putting it in plastic bottles, shipping it to the grocery store up the road in Guelph [Ontario]. And I saw people in the supermarkets buy cases of bottled water that came from just down the road,” Martin said. “It strikes me as insane, and now those bottles end up on a beach somewhere, and they’re blaming the plastics industry.”
Plastics can be a wasteful, but also an opportunity, she and others pointed out.
Many people “don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and [food] packaging is integral to their daily life,” said Calvin Lakhan, an environmental scientist based in Ontario, who argues that packaging provides less-expensive food options to disadvantaged people.
Both he and Martin are members of Sustainable Packaging Research, Information, and Networking Group (SPRING), a think tank of experts with backgrounds in packaging, materials science, recycling and other fields who are united by a desire for sustainable solutions.
Expanding waste lines
The sight of a crumpled water bottle or fast-food wrappers on the pavement might give the impression that single-use packaging is everywhere, spending all but a brief moment of its life as anything other than litter. But plastic — stubbornly hovering at recycling rates of about 13 percent for packaging, or below, depending on the product — is far from the most common material in the trash stream.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), every person in the U.S. generated 4.9 pounds of waste every day in 2018, the last year for which statistics are available. In 1960, that figure — minus the weight of food waste, which wasn’t then part of the record — was just 2.68 pounds.
Not all of it goes to landfills — in 2018, 1.16 pounds per person was recycled every day, along with 0.72 pound that was composted or, in the case of food, diverted in some other way.
In all, people in the U.S. generated 292.4 million tons of waste in 2018. The materials making up most of the waste were paper and paperboard, at 23 percent; and food, at 21.6 percent. After plastics, at 12.2 percent, and yard trimmings, at 12.1 percent, no other materials hit double-digit percentages.
As the founder of SPRING, Bob Lilienfeld, who has spent decades to get his arms around our detritus, has a ready response as to why so much plastic ends up as waste.
“Once plastic started to replace glass and metal, then the issue became more plastic-related. So, when you see all the dumping that occurs in Southeast Asia in oceans and waterways, if there wasn’t so much plastic, they’d be dumping something else,” he said.
Under fire
But it is plastic that is attracting the most attention.
“When you see a sea turtle with a straw in its nose, that's just what consumers have kind of latched onto,” said Alison Younts, lead sustainability consultant for Trayak, a software and solutions provider that offers life-cycle assessments comparing the impact of various packaging formats and materials.
In January, the U.S. Plastics Pact released its Problematic and Unnecessary Materials List, singling out items it says pose problems because they are not routinely composted or recycled. The list, compiled by the consortium, founded by The Recycling Partnership and the World Wildlife Fund, includes opaque or pigmented PET bottles, PET glycol in rigid packaging and products made with PS.
Meanwhile, momentum continues to grow for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) arrangements that would create infrastructure for handling end-of-life packaging by levying fees on companies engaged in various levels of the supply chain. Just in the past few months, legislatures in New York and Colorado have advanced the issue.
Views on the funding schemes vary.
“Our industry has said, ‘We will accept a fee on our products to be able to fund the necessary recycling infrastructure to get to that point where the recycling rates are to the level we all want them. We’re willing to do that,’ ” said Matt Seaholm, the new CEO for the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS). “Unfortunately, a lot of the proposals that we’ve seen out there are meant more to punish than they are to be collaborative in finding solutions, and that’s where a lot of push-pull is happening, especially at the state level.”
One thing is clear: Recycling hasn’t proved to be the panacea for handling packaging waste that many expected.
In 1960, the U.S. produced 120,000 tons of used plastic packaging. Over the next four decades, that number witnessed a hundredfold increase; in 2018, almost as much packaging was landfilled as was produced in 2000. In 2018, the last year for which the EPA compiled numbers, the U.S produced 14.5 million tons of plastic packaging, sending 10.9 million tons to landfills.
Waste-to-energy facilities incinerated about 2.5 million tons of plastic packaging in 2018. But just under 2 million tons were recycled, for a rate of about 13.6 percent of what was produced in that same year — about the same percentage that was recycled nearly a decade earlier.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in 2017, globally, 95 percent of plastic packaging material value was lost after a single use. Only 9 percent of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, the Sierra Club says.
Overall, recycling rates of all plastic materials plateaued at 9 percent in 2015, 2017 and 2018, the last three years reported by the EPA.
Getting up to speed
“What we hear and understand is that there’s a great desire to recycle and to participate in recycling, and to participate in the broader circular economy. That’s something that’s becoming … people are much more aware of it, and it’s the easiest way that they can engage in a positive action for the environment and their economy, like in their home,” said Karen Bandhauer, chief corporate engagement officer for the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit
According to the partnership, a lot of work is needed — it estimates modernizing the country’s recycling infrastructure would cost about $17 billion but would deliver a return on investment of more than $30 billion over 10 years. According to the partnership’s report, $4 billion is needed just to improve residential recycling solutions for film and flexible plastics.
The current system isn’t good enough, conceded Steve Alexander, president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR).
“It’s like my 1978 Chevy Chevette trying to meet current California emission standards … it’s just not going to happen,” Alexander said. “We need to make sure that the system can deal with the packaging stream of today.”
Considering that about 40 million U.S. households still do not have recycling access that is on par with their trash service, meeting the current need for recycling is a tall order. Problems with the recycling system involve costs, logistics and the country’s decentralized quilt of recycling rules and opportunities.
Just focusing on three kinds of containers — PET, HDPE and PP — would go a long way, Alexander said.
“The first thing we need is consistency across the board and what recycling programs take. We need to expand recycling programs, so more of the population has access to recycling programs. And then also we need to ensure that how a brand company labels their products actually represents the recyclability of that product, and it’s not just greenwashing,” he said.
Seaholm plans to use his pulpit at PLASTICS to help the industry propel recycling forward, with infrastructure investment, technological advances and greater standardization of terms like “sustainable” and “recyclable.”
“But we can’t do it alone. The plastics industry by itself does not control the entire recycling chain. You’ve got the collection, you’ve got the sortation. You even have the consumers [who] have to be a part of it. Put it all together, and we can get our recycling rates to the place that we want. … But it’s a collective effort, that it’s our job to lead,” Seaholm said. (See Page 22 for full interview.)
Recycling remedies
Seaholm, Alexander and others believe the recycling system is fixable.
New innovations, including the use of artificial intelligence systems in sorting, already are paying dividends, Alexander said.
In one example, he pointed to recyclers’ issues with shrink-wrap labels on PET containers, which became popular several years ago. Because the labels were gumming up the works, the industry worked to create floatable alternatives.
“There’s this trope going around that recycling is broken, it’s not going to fix the problems, that we can’t recycle our way out of the problem. Well, recycling can be an essential part of the solution of our sustainable use of plastics and packaging,” retired engineer Martin said. “But we need to pay a lot more attention to the packages that are being made and making sure that they are recyclable.”
Lilienfeld, for one, isn’t so sure.
“We can’t get 35 percent or more of the American public to get vaccinated [against COVID-19]. What makes you think you're going to get those people to sort their trash?” he asked.
Beyond the bin
The co-investigator of “The Waste Wiki” and a member of the faculty of environmental studies at York University in Toronto, Lakhan has spent his career trying to understand waste. In part, he thinks the focus on recycling is missing the point. To him, plastics’ sustainability comes from the first “R,” not the third, in the well-known phrase: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
“What I always try to remind people of is that Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is not just a catchy phrase, it’s the order in which we’re supposed to do things. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that the lightweighting of plastics achieves the first ‘R,’ which is waste reduction.”
He takes aim at brand owners — and even governments and circular economy advocate Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which wants all plastics packaging to be reusable, compostable or recyclable — that he believes have gone overboard in their emphasis on recycling. Brand owners, for example, have made a habit of setting — then scrapping and replacing — thresholds for the use of post-consumer resin (PCR). While the goals help establish a market for PCR, they often are unrealistic when it comes to pegging a number on a volume that is actually achievable.
Notions of “zero-waste” or “100 percent circularity” are unattainable, he said.
“Companies in particular,” Lakhan said, “are feeding into this frenzy, making promises that they can’t deliver on, so that the Ellen MacArthur 2025 goals [for PCR use] that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have all signed on to, they’re literally impossible, and I think that overpromising and underdelivering will actually undermine sustainability efforts in time.”
Recycling shouldn’t be the “end-all, be-all,” he said.
“Recycling and sustainability are not the same thing, and I think a lot of policymakers conflate those two,” Lakhan said.
Advancing chemical recycling
That’s why Lakhan—among others — believes mechanical recycling alone isn’t going to cut it.
“We need to expand our definition of recycling or add tools to our toolbox that can say, ‘You know what, our existing recycling infrastructure is perfect for the things that it was designed for, cardboard, boxboard, even PET, HDPE. But when it comes to all this other stuff, instead of trying to develop EPR regulations that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, why aren’t we looking at the potential alternatives?’ ” Lakhan asked.
He pointed out that the last 10 years have seen a proliferation of lightweight, multi-resin plastics. The cost of transporting such materials is prohibitive, and there is no mechanical way to separate them into constituent polymers, anyway.
For many hard-to-recycle materials, chemical recycling could be an answer, Lilienfeld said.
Lilienfeld said some materials just might not be appropriate for traditional recycling approaches.
“I'll go out on a limb and say we’re never going to see large quantities of polypropylene, polystyrene or low-density [materials] mechanically recycled, and, so, the solution for those is on the chemical side,” he said. “And that doesn't necessarily mean that, on the chemical side, the economics are positive; it could mean that the economics are less negative.”
‘Tragedy of the commons’
Ultimately, where some see problems with packaging, others, like Martin and Lilienfeld, see bigger issues.
Martin is on a crusade against overconsumption; so is Lilienfeld, who since 1994 has been the editor and publisher of The ULS Report, a newsletter that encourages readers to “use less stuff.”
“My personal perspective, and I’m very passionate about it, is that there is a role for plastics packaging in a more sustainable world. I think it’s essential to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” Martin said. “But there is a great deal of unnecessary excess packaging, there’s excess consumption of consumer packaged goods.”
Lilienfeld believes the waste dilemma is just a part of a bigger issue involving the environment.
To him, it’s all an example of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” a situation — first described within the field of psychology — in which a group of herders exhaust a shared green space because each of them believes he or she would benefit from adding animals. As Lilienfeld explained, without rules and a sense of shared responsibility, people can end up harming themselves in the long run in pursuit of their short-term self-interests.
“If we get to the point that there’s enough environmental catastrophe … that the global community is fully bought into the fact that, if something doesn't happen immediately, we’re all going to die, that’s when this problem can get solved,” Lilienfeld said.
Unboxing the future
Modernizing the system so that it might recover more materials is a big ask. Whether the industry and other stakeholders will get there depends on whose opinion you trust.
For Case, consumer polling is pointing in the right direction — people are telling retailers they are willing to pay more for sustainable options, including refillable packaging. How much more is another question; people aren’t terribly reliable when it comes to reporting their own behaviors.
“We always say, ‘Look, consumers, they lie on surveys.' However, the way they respond to those kinds of questions reflect their aspirations. They want to be doing right, so anyone that can make it easy for them to do it wins in the marketplace,” Case said.
As long as the demand exists, though, the Recycling Partnership’s Bandhauer believes the industry can overcome challenges involving packaging design and recycling infrastructure.
“We think those challenges for the most part are solvable. They’re solvable on the design side, and then they’re also solvable on the recovery side. But they’re going to take concerted effort and funding,” she said.
Generational change is coming, predicted 17-year recycling veteran Alexander.
It has to.
“Either it’s going to change, or we’re going to have products that are going to be banned, and you can’t ban your way out of plastics packaging. Plastics, by and large, serves very useful purposes, and you simply can’t ban your way out, so we’re going to have to figure out a way to make the packaging more sustainable,” APR’s Alexander said.
In anticipating what comes next, new PLASTICS CEO Seaholm looked back on the industry’s history of innovation. PLASTICS’ goal now is to show that plastic is the sustainable option for almost all applications, he said.
“I think there’s a reason why the plastics industry has grown by leaps and bounds and perhaps even grown to the point where it’s outgrown the ability to recycle the material that’s in the products that we manufacture. I mean, the innovation and improvements in technology have just been outpacing the ability to ultimately collect, sort and recycle the products that we manufacture. It wins because it’s such a great material,” Seaholm said. “We just have to do more in order to prove that it’s a sustainable manufacturing and ultimately recycling process that we go through.”
Contact:
Plastics Industry Association, Washington, 202-974-5200, www.plasticsindustry.org
Trayak Inc., Mason, Ohio, 513-445-3264, https://trayak.com
Karen Hanna, senior staff reporter
