The level of attention and rapid action taken by communities to ban plastic
straws
raised an important question for companies. How sustainable is their use of
plastic packaging?
With demands for plastic on the rise, little recycled content used, and
recycling rates poor at best, there is a need for companies to look
carefully at their packaging
strategies
to ensure meaningful progress toward a more circular approach, where the
material gets recovered for another valuable use — closing the loop.
This demands much more effort to improve packaging design and recycling
systems, as well as consumer engagement in
recycling.
Design for circularity
Plastic manufacturing and use have been on a rapid upward climb, expected to
double
in 20 years. Half of plastic is estimated to be single-use,
dominated
by packaging. Current recycled content levels are very low in plastic
packaging, less than 10
percent
for the most common plastics.
Cleaning up beauty's ugly impacts
Join us at SB'24 San Diego as Victor Casale — co-founder of Pact Collective and co-founder and CEO of MOB Beauty — shares insights from ongoing collaborations with materials innovators to create fully compostable, refillable, plastic-free, and easier-to-recycle packaging alternatives for beauty and wellness products.
Smarter package design is a key to the solution. Through its New Plastics
Economy Global
Commitment,
which now has over 350
signatories,
the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s
vision
for plastic packaging includes a call to:
-
Eliminate all problematic and unnecessary plastic items.
-
Innovate to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable or
compostable.
-
Circulate all the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out
of the environment.
This is more than getting rid
of
plastic straws. Companies need to minimize
packaging
materials, use reusable options whenever possible, shift away from packages
that are not recyclable or compostable, and include recycled content in the
remaining plastic used.
The Cola-Cola Company is active in this approach, having long been using
reusable bottles and reducing the weight of packaging, such as reducing the
weight of its latest Vitaminwater bottle 15
percent.
The company is also aggressively pursuing the additional aspects of design,
with an aspiration of a “world without waste.” The company’s design approach
includes
targets
to “make our packaging 100 percent recyclable globally by 2025 — and use at
least 50 percent recycled material in our packaging by 2030.”
Designing a package to be recyclable involves more than using a material
that is commonly collected for recycling — it needs to be able to be
collected and sorted, processed commercially, and used in materials again
with existing systems.
The Coca-Cola Company’s Simply brand juices are in PET bottles. While
this is typically one of the most recycled types of packages, the larger,
89-oz. Simply bottle had an integrated handle made from PETG. PETG is not
the same as PET and causes significant issues in processing PET for
recycling.
This package also had a label and adhesive that was hard to wash off during
recycling. Both of these issues meant the package was not recyclable and
could contaminate the PET recycling stream, reducing its value/ability to
have another use. The company worked to improve the package and now has a
recyclable
PET version for this product without the PETG handle and with a
recycling-compatible label.
These are just a few examples of design areas for packaging to be optimized
for this system. Walmart is one company that developed
guidance
to help suppliers understand these opportunities to inform their package
design.
Coca-Cola is also progressing on its recycled content target. The company
has some water bottles made from 100 percent recycled plastic — but has more
to do, since globally just 9 percent of recycled material is used in its PET
packaging. Companies can look to the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s
(SPC) Design for Recycled Content Guide for
more information on how to include recycled content in packaging.
Support infrastructure and technology development
Just 15 percent of plastic packaging is
recovered
from US consumers. The barriers to increase this substantially include
designing packaging for recycling, but Closed Loop
Partners
point out that current infrastructure and technologies have significant
limits in managing used plastic – from collection to recycling it for
another use.
The
SPC
found that only half of the US population automatically has a recycling
program available to them, with others either required to opt-in, subscribe,
drop-off or have no program available.
Proactive companies understand this challenge and have been supporting the
development of recycling systems, such as ways to make it easy for consumers
to recycle packaging and technologies that improve the sorting and
processing of collected packaging.
This has largely involved supporting collaborative efforts and funding
organizations aimed to address this need, such as The Recycling
Partnership — a collaborative effort with 40 organizations working to
support the growth of systems for consumers to have ready access to
recycling — as well as the Closed Loop Fund (from Closed Loop Partners), a consortium of over a dozen
consumer product companies working to scale recycling and circular economy
infrastructure
across the US. Amazon recently invested $10
million
in Closed Loop Fund to help increase the availability of curbside recycling for three
million homes in communities across the country.
Direct engagement is also important. The Coca-Cola Company has a loan
agreement
with a company that will process the harder to recycle plastic and make a
recycled food-grade PET available for their use. And Henkel has a
partnership with the Plastic
Bank
that helped build plastic collection
centers
in Haiti — not only addressing infrastructure needs, but also providing
new jobs in the impoverished community. By the end of 2018, the work through
the Plastic Bank
collected
over 60 metric tons of plastic that was then recycled for another use.
Improve consumer engagement
The final piece of the puzzle is consumers. The
majority
of US consumers say that recycling is important to them and that it
influences their purchase choices. They also say that they would
look to the product’s packaging
first to learn if it was recyclable, with two-thirds of those surveyed
assuming a package is not recyclable if it does not have a recycling symbol
or language on it. This partly explains why recycling rates are low.
However, time after time our clients find that consumers think they know
what to do with their used packaging, but say the wrong thing about what is
recyclable or compostable. A recent
study
by the Grocery Manufacturers Association echoes this, with 92 percent of
consumers surveyed being unsure or believing that anything with a plastic
resin code could be recycled curbside, despite the fact that some of those resin codes are not recyclable. This demands
more active education of consumers and makes the case for including clear
recycling language on packages, such as the How2Recycle
label.
Image credit: How2Recycle
The easy-to-understand How2Recycle label guides consumers on what to do with
their used packaging (e.g., recyclable, store-drop off, check locally, not
recyclable). The How2Recycle program now includes 130 member
companies, including
Target — which is using the
standardized label across its private-brand products; the retailer takes it
a step further with recycling kiosks in all its stores. While having access
to can, glass, plastic bottle, plastic bag and other recycling in stores
helps to increase collection, it also reinforces the message to consumers on
what is recyclable to support recycling more broadly.
Walmart and Unilever are also using the How2Recycling label. To ensure
that consumers make use of this information, these companies partnered to
launch a program in 2019 to educate and
encourage
consumers to recycle. The “Bring It to the Bin” campaign will include
in-store and online education about recycling. Henkel has a similar aim, and
a unique target —
to have 1 billion consumers informed about recycling by 2025.
These efforts to not only label packaging about its recyclability — but also
reinforcing the message so consumers know what to do with that information
and can effectively do their part — is a critical strategy because, without
consumer participation in recycling, the loop is broken.
This progress is encouraging and establishing a new baseline expectation —
for all companies to advance effective plastic packaging strategies in
design, system development, and consumer engagement and education. This
level of effort is what is needed for the sea change required to move
plastic from our oceans and environment to a circular and more sustainable
model.
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VP of Consulting
Cheryl Baldwin, Ph.D. is a Vice President of Consulting for Pure Strategies, where she partners with corporate clients to develop and execute strategies to improve sustainability performance across food, home and personal care, and cosmetics industries. Cheryl also leads the firms’ global market research to generate new insights to accelerate business transformation.
Published May 15, 2019 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST