After nearly a decade of work, 90% of toothpaste tubes and over 75% of all HDPE plastic squeeze tubes on the U.S market have designs compatible with color HDPE recycling streams, Stina Inc. recently reported.
Stina also launched PlasticTubeRecycling.org in late March, which outlines the key elements of recyclability for plastic squeeze tubes.
The research and insights company started working on the U.S. Tube Recycling Project in 2015 and a similar project in Europe in 2020. It involved a variety of stakeholders and was funded by Albéa, Berry Global, Colgate-Palmolive Company, Estée Lauder, Haleon, Huhtamaki, Kenvue and Tupack, according to a press release.
“At the start of the project, it was imperative to determine if recyclers could recycle plastic squeeze tubes with an existing commodity stream,” Stina wrote. “The projects have collected and shared critical information with reclaimers and industry on generation, market share, compatibility and sortability to show compatibility throughout the recycling process.”
Design issues, such as toothpaste tubes with aluminum barrier layers, were a key barrier, but “collaboration of producers and multi-stakeholder engagement across the plastic recycling value chain made it possible to understand the recyclers’ perspective and thus coordinate innovation across the supply chain to achieve a critical step, design for recycling,” the press release added.
The project relied on the Association of Plastic Recyclers’ Design Guide for Plastics Recyclability and the help of RecyClass to “use innovation to balance the design drivers and make significant progress towards tubes designed for recycling.” The Association of Plastic Recyclers owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of Plastics Recycling Update.
Scott Saunders, general manager at Troy, Alabama-headquartered reclaimer KW Plastics, said in a written statement that “design for recyclability is critical to providing quality material to reclaimers in order to produce quality feedstock for recycled content.”
“The efforts that brands have made to convert the majority of tubes to compatible designs is great progress and we are happy to accept them,” Saunders said.
