While growing concern over plastic pollution and climate change is prompting new legislation at the city and state levels, single-use plastic bans and extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations may soon be passed at the federal level as well. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) and Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) recently circulated a discussion draft of a bill that amends the Solid Waste Disposal Act, originally passed in 1965. Specifically, the proposed law would ban certain single-use plastics, institute a 10-cent nationwide container deposit, place a moratorium on new plastics facilities, and require producers and users of plastics to take responsibility for collecting and recycling materials.
As written, the bill requires companies that produce certain products to pay for and coordinate the recycling collection, sorting, and cleanup of any plastic waste associated with their products. While that would be a major shift for the U.S. market, we are the only industrial country that does not require industry to share the responsibility of recycling programs, according to Claire Koelsch Sand, a board member of the Institute of Food Technologists and owner of Packaging Technology and Research, a consulting group based in Stillwater, Minn. “The proposed legislation is in line with what global companies, packaging suppliers, and consumers have employed effectively to fund collection and sorting since the early 1990s,” she says. “The technology and logistical roadmaps are there for rapid adoption in the U.S.”
Others in the field note that the topic of recycling programs shouldn’t be about pointing fingers in terms of who pays. “This is a shared responsibility between municipalities, consumers, and industry,” says Nina Goodrich, director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and executive director of GreenBlue, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainability based in Charlottesville, Va. “We need to build awareness in the community and to recognize that all pieces of the value chain have some level of responsibility.”
Industry Response to Plastic Pollution Problem
Without federal regulations, industry has approached the problem of plastic waste in a number of ways. In the 1990s, designers streamlined packaging to use as little plastic as possible. Next, the industry experimented with alternative materials such as metal, glass, and paper, which also proved problematic in terms of their carbon footprint. “Material switches are like moving deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking,” says Sand, pointing out that transporting heavy yet recyclable glass bottles, for example, results in unwanted carbon emissions.
Industry has also experimented with using biodegradable materials—think six-pack rings made of barley and wheat remnants that are a byproduct of the brewing process—although those might introduce more problems than they solve. “First, it’s never a good idea to intentionally create packaging that’s litter friendly,” says Goodrich. “Second, ‘biodegradable’ is a very vague term that doesn’t have time or temperature boundaries that can be proven,” she adds.
Compostable containers may be a good solution in closed systems such as stadiums where a large quantity can be composted in a controlled environment. However, composting also creates greenhouse gases, creating other unintended environmental consequences, notes Sand.
A New Focus
The latest approach focuses on the hurdle of collection and sorting. To that end, industry has recently made great strides in its understanding of what interferes with the ability of a material to be sorted or reprocessed. “You may start out with a 100-percent recyclable PET bottle but then add a metal closure on a cap or use ink, coatings, adhesives, or labels that aren’t recyclable, and that product goes straight into residual trash,” says Goodrich, adding that the Association of Plastic Recyclers offers resources that pinpoint which label manufacturers have passed the organization’s critical guidance tests.
There’s also an emphasis to make clearer and more prominent how-to-recycle labels on packages. “Switzerland’s recycling rates for PET are somewhere approaching 90 percent,” says Sand, “so it could be just as simple as [creating] better labels that help consumers pre-sort better so that facilities have less sorting to do.”
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition launched a How2Recycle program in 2012 that works with brands to complete an evaluation of a product’s recyclability and create a standardized labeling system that clearly communicates recycling instructions to the public. “We have given more than 80,000 recommendations to date,” says Goodrich. “The industry is getting much wiser in terms of what types of labels and adhesive to use to make sure their package stays recyclable and communicate that to consumers.”
In fact, major brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Danone, Kellogg, McCormick, and Nestlé have made public commitments to make their packaging 100-percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025 via multifaceted initiatives and aggressive timetables. “This has really been gathering steam in the last six months,” says Goodrich.
For example, Fuji pledged to make all of its plastic bottles from 100-percent recycled plastic (rPET); Coca-Cola pledged to make all of its packaging recyclable by 2025, and to use 50 percent recycled content by 2030; and PepsiCo has stated that its goal is to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable by 2025 and reduce its use of virgin plastics by 35 percent.
The more plastic that’s recycled, the more recycled plastic will be available to manufacturers to use in new packages, creating an efficient circular system and feedback loop.
How Technology Can Help
Sorting materials, particularly in single-stream recycling systems popular in the U.S., is a time-consuming task that technological advances may help streamline. Whereas a worker may be able to sort 30 to 40 items per minute, a robot could double that rate and an optical sorter may get through upward of hundreds or even thousands of picks per minute via machine-learning software and sensors that recognize visual patterns associated with specific items.
Meanwhile, flex wrap plastic packaging is uniquely difficult to collect and sort. For one, it’s often a multi-layered material, all of which may not be recyclable and is difficult to separate to sort. Bread bags, which are made from the same material as milk jugs, should be recyclable but they are a handling nightmare for the facilities because they get sucked into the machines.
Advanced flex wrap packing that’s cost effective to produce and won’t add to pollution is currently being researched and developed. One company is experimenting with extracting the protein from natural silk to create a protective layer to wrap produce in place of single-use plastic, for example. Meanwhile, the industry may want to consider novel solutions, says Sand. “With the difficulty with recycling flex wrap, maybe this is a case where a compostable option should be considered,” she says. “Or can we treat them like corrugated cardboard and compress them into a more easily handled form.”
Despite novel solutions and tech, some argue the biggest hope for addressing plastic pollution involves putting an economic, environmentally based price tag on packaging. “The reason that aluminum is recycled at high rates in the U.S. is because it’s economically valuable,” says Sand. “If recycled PET’s value went up, then, boy, we would figure out how to recycle it.”
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