Plastics recycling firms continue to process about 958 million pounds of post-industrial PVC and 142 million pounds of post-consumer, non-packaging PVC each year, together accounting for an estimated 27% of annual North American PVC waste generation, the Vinyl Sustainability Council said this week.
The organization, which was founded as a project of the Vinyl Institute trade association, on Dec. 9 released its annual report covering sustainability metrics. It showed a number of industry initiatives are underway to increase recycling, but the data so far suggests recycling figures are flat.
The organization reported an annual estimated North American PVC recycling figure of 1.1 billion pounds, including both post-industrial and post-consumer. That figure comes from a survey of 140 recycling companies in the U.S. and Canada. The survey was last completed in 2019, so the calculation is five years old at this point and is the number the report includes each year.
Still, in 2024 the Vinyl Institute conducted a “spot check” to gauge the ongoing accuracy of that figure.
“As expected, some individual companies reported higher volumes and others reported lower volumes,” the association wrote. “Overall, the spot check results give the VI (Vinyl Institute) a high degree of confidence in its previously reported industry recycling volume of 1.1 billion pounds in the U.S. and Canada.”
The 27% calculation for post-industrial and post-consumer combined comes from adding the 1.1 billion pounds figure to the U.S. EPA’s data for 2018 PVC disposal in the municipal waste stream – which came out to 1.7 billion pounds – and a Vinyl Institute estimate for PVC in construction and demolition waste.
It’s difficult to calculate a post-consumer-specific recycling rate – which is not included in the report – because the 142-million-pound post-consumer recovery covers both U.S. and Canadian recovery, while the EPA generation data only covers the U.S. Additionally, the industry post-consumer figure doesn’t include packaging. EPA figures indicate, in 2018, about 780 million pounds of PVC packaging entered the disposal stream and that a “negligible” amount of it was recycled.
In a statement early this year about PVC recycling, the Vinyl Institute described the nuance of the material and one reason the post-consumer and post-industrial figures are so far apart.
“Unlike many other consumer products, vinyl materials are durable products that are in service for decades,” the group wrote. “As such, most of the vinyl material diverted from waste streams is considered ‘pre-consumer’ or ‘post-industrial,’ which consists primarily of scrap material generated during manufacturing and installation of vinyl products.”
Still, the Vinyl Sustainability Council set a goal in 2020 to increase post-consumer vinyl recycling to 160 million pounds by 2025. To that end, the group in 2023 launched a manufacturer-funded grant program providing $3 million in post-consumer recycling improvement grants over the following three years.
The grant program awarded $1.7 million in grants in 2023, and the organization’s latest report said five of those projects have been completed. Together, they’ll expand North American post-consumer vinyl recycling capacity by 30 million pounds, the report estimated.
