Increasing film recycling takes coordinated efforts by both brand owners and reclaimers – and it takes a true understanding that one sector can’t solve the issue alone, speakers said at the 2024 Plastics Recycling Conference in March.
A session titled “Design from the Start: How to Achieve Recyclable Film and Flexible Packaging” looked squarely at a seemingly stagnant U.S. film recycling sector, examining why it hasn’t improved as fast as stakeholders would like.
“We know film and flexible packaging has been a challenge for years and years and years,” said Emily Tipaldo, then-executive director of the U.S. Plastics Pact. “Millions and millions of dollars have been spent by research initiatives, and companies on their own, to try to find a solution. And we haven’t gotten there yet.”
Recyclability is important, but ‘kind of comes second’
With the slow pace of progress, it’s easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that if some other sector would just take some sort of action, all of the problems would be solved, said Crystal Bayliss, director of strategy and engagement at the U.S. Plastics Pact. But it’s often not that simple.
For example, she said, one hypothetical “fix-all” question is, why haven’t all brands simply switched to mono-material PE film for their packaging? It’s much more readily recyclable than its multi-material counterparts, and yet those multi-material packaging types proliferate, continually challenging the recycling system.
“It’s not for lack of trying,” said Lou Fenech, North America packaging sustainability manager for Mondelēz International, which owns brands such as Nabisco, Oreo and Sour Patch Kids.
Fenech said recyclable PE film is used in a number of Mondelēz’s packaging products, but that it doesn’t work across the board. The carbon footprint of packaging production and recyclability has to be weighed against the carbon footprint of other actions, Fenech said, and Mondelēz’s primary objective is to ensure it is not causing food waste. “I really think that needs to be kind of our true north star,” he said. “Recyclability kind of comes second, but it’s still important.”
With those priorities in mind, some products simply require more of a barrier to prevent food spoilage than traditional PE film provides, Fenech said. Barrier protection in the film keeps oxygen and moisture out of the contained product. For the more recyclable PE film to provide the same level of barrier protection as something like the less-recycled metalized PP film, the PE film would need to be thicker than normal. But using a thicker PE film might come into conflict with the company’s virgin plastic reduction commitments, he added.
“We don’t want to put something out there that’s going to be three times the amount of virgin plastic on the market, when we can have a more efficient solution if that’s possible,” he said.
There are also technical challenges. Fenech noted PE melts at a lower temperature than the multi-material films in common use, and that becomes a hurdle when a product is being sealed inside the film packaging. With a lower melt point, the film can become distorted when the seal is being formed.
“That window of kind of the perfect zone where you’re getting a good seal and not distorting the film is a lot tougher to find with PE film than with traditional materials, which would be PET on the outside or PP in some cases,” Fenech said.
Multi-materials cause reclamation woes
Moving downstream, Bayliss asked another hypothetical fix-all question: Why can’t reclaimers just recycle more types of film?
Speaking from a film reclamation standpoint, Roxanne Spiekerman, vice president of public affairs for film processor PreZero US, said there are technical and aesthetic reasons. Film reclaimers deal with some of “the most narrow specs in all plastics recycling,” she said, with products as thin as 1 millimeter creating challenges that simply don’t exist for rigid plastics.
“Every time you’re introducing post-consumer into the situation, you’re introducing the unknown,” Spiekerman said. That makes bringing in a wider array of material types a daunting proposal. Already, when PreZero is producing PCR PE film, the company is challenged by the other types of polymers that come in as contamination. Although larger contaminants are straightforward to remove and metal detection equipment can separate out metal fractions, PP or nylon coming in with PE films creates technical challenges during reclamation.
“Everyone thinks ‘plastic film is plastic film,’ they don’t really see the difference in it,” Spiekerman said.
Aesthetically, she noted that film recycling companies have to sell the material they produce, so it has to be something that brands want to buy. That means supplying flexible packaging of certain colors, which “becomes pretty difficult when you’re dealing with post-consumer, so it’s another thing that restricts the spectrum of material that we can get back into the stream.”
Lack of value holds back collection
Before end users buy the resin, and before reclaimers produce that resin, the film must be collected – and that provides one more interconnected challenge. Fabrizio Di Gregorio, technical director for Plastics Recyclers Europe, said Europe sees 11 million metric tons of flexible packaging coming on the market each year. Of that amount, only about half is collected for recycling, and he attributed the gap to the expense of collection.
“No one would like to collect something that has no value, and often in flexibles there is no value in recycling,” Gregorio said.
The minimal value is partially because the concentration of desired materials like PE and PP can vary widely and can sometimes be less than 50%, since there are so many multi-material films that also include ethyl vinyl alcohol, polyamides, inks, laminating adhesives and more.
“There is really no way, then, to replace virgin that is 100% made by PE or PP, in a flexible application,” Gregorio said.
Even with Europe’s collection challenges, film collection in the U.S. is in a poor position in comparison. It relies largely on store drop-off programs for post-consumer film. Curbside film collection is offered in some parts of Europe, for example, but is rare in the U.S.
“We are so far from that,” Spiekerman said.
