Circular Economy Materials & Packaging

How to Overcome Challenges to Reducing Plastic Waste

These are some of the many ways Dow is working to keep plastic waste from entering our ecosystems. We need even more collaboration within the supply chain to implement meaningful solutions that tackle plastic waste on a broad scale.

Sponsored Content | / This article is sponsored by Dow | By Haley Lowry | Published 5 years ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Dow is working with Colombian startup Conceptos Plasticos to create construction materials from plastic waste | Conceptos Plasticos

With eight million metric tons of plastic entering our oceans each year, plastic litter is a global issue that is receiving increasing attention from consumers, NGOs and governments around the world. While this is a complex issue, identifying and implementing solutions is achievable if the entire value chain — from plastic producers such as Dow, to consumer product and waste management companies — work together. Here are some of the ways we are collaborating with partners from NGOs to industry peers to help find new solutions:

Achieving sustainability and safety

From packaging food to keep it safe and fresh, to helmets and artificial limbs, plastic is an integral part of our daily lives. How do we continue to meet consumers’ needs for quality products without compromising on sustainability and safety?

Companies across the value chain that are involved in the production of plastic can play a role in developing more sustainable packaging solutions that not only meet customer needs, but also benefit the planet. At Dow, we created RecycleReady Technology, which provides packaging manufacturers with a sustainable packaging system that qualifies for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s How2Recycle program. This allows consumers to recycle packaging for products like granola and nuts by dropping them off at participating retail and grocery stores.

Another good example is the work being done by consumer brands in the food and beverage space. The NextGen Consortium, convened by Closed Loop Partners, is a multi-year partnership founded by Starbucks and McDonald’s aimed at addressing single-use food packaging waste globally in three stages. The first was the NextGen Cup Challenge in September 2018, where startups around the world were challenged to design more recyclable cups — NextGen announced 12 winners of the challenge in February. The next two stages are the commercialization of the winning cup designs and collaboration with value chain partners in the cup industry to provide testing, piloting and opportunities to scale the solution.

Educating consumers and supporting waste management infrastructure

Learning how to recycle starts at home and within our local communities. Helping people understand the do’s and don’ts, and how to play an active role in solving the issue of plastic litter, will be a critical step in implementing a successful waste management system.

Plastic producers can work together with local communities, governments, school systems and industry partners to educate consumers and spur action. Through our own social initiative — Project Butterfly — in South Africa, we are partnering with local nonprofit organizations to educate and engage with nearby communities about proper waste management and organizing clean-ups. As part of this project, we are working with WILDTRUST, a South African environmental nonprofit, to create a program that empowers local entrepreneurs to generate income by collecting and exchanging recyclable waste.

Beyond education, our industry needs to explore and invest in new, innovative solutions and infrastructure to make it easier for consumers to recycle hard-to-recycle plastics.

In North America, Dow collaborated with several partners including Recyclebank and Keep America Beautiful to create the Hefty® EnergyBag® program. Consumers can discard hard-to-recycle plastics via collection or drop-off points at participating stores, which are sent to local materials recovery facilities and converted into valuable resources. As of July 2018, we collected more than 176,500 bags and diverted more than 115 tons of plastics from landfills, equivalent to roughly 92 million snack-sized chip bags and converted into energy resources.

In addition to these initiatives, a new handbook from Circulate Capital and The Ocean Conservancy, "Investing to Reduce Plastic Pollution in South and Southeast Asia," provides a blueprint for immediate investment solutions for waste management infrastructure in the region. The handbook lays out many factors affecting the entire plastics value chain — from consumer-packaged goods companies to plastic producers — to help investors, governments, NGOs, entrepreneurs and academic institutions identify the best opportunities to end plastic waste.

Finding recycling alternatives and solutions

While progress has been made to improve waste management infrastructure and the recyclability of products, some items remain hard to recycle.

Dow is demonstrating the value of post-consumer plastic waste by working with partners to convert plastic waste into next-generation building materials, including plastic roads and schools. We have used over 220,000 pounds of plastic to construct roads around the world including two roads in Freeport, Texas this past year. We also collaborated with Conceptos Plásticos, a startup that transforms plastic waste into constructive systems, to build sustainable classrooms in Cartagena, Colombia. Our goal is to collaborate with the industry to drive fast adoption of these solutions.

These examples highlight some of the many ways we are working to keep plastic waste from entering our ecosystems. We need even more collaboration within the supply chain to implement meaningful solutions that will tackle plastic waste on a broad scale.