Polypropylene bale pricing has risen to levels not seen since August 2022, largely attributed to increasing demand for use in food-contact packaging. | Retan/Shutterstock
Post-consumer PP bale pricing has continued to rise in March, reflecting trends in recycled content adoption and potentially encouraging MRFs to sort for the polymer.
Demand is increasing, especially for food-grade PP, with brand owners driving the push in consumption, said Jeff Snyder, senior vice president of recycling and sustainability at Ohio-based Rumpke Waste and Recycling. “The people making packaging want more of it,” he said, so buyers are competing more for it in the marketplace.
In the first half of March, PP bale prices averaged 18.84 cents per pound, according to RecyclingMarkets.net data. Since then, prices have continued to rise rapidly, market sources told Plastics Recycling Update.
“I think with the prices going up, it incentivizes the MRFs that aren’t doing it to do it,” but that’s only part of the equation, Snyder said. Some of the MRFs that aren’t sorting for PP physically can’t, he said, lacking the necessary space and infrastructure.
Rumpke produces about two to three bales per week of post-consumer PP, he said, and was among four MRFs working on increasing PP recovery in the past couple years to help push food-grade material back into packaging.
Around the same time, in September 2023, reclaimer Plastics Recycling Inc. began processing PP in Indianapolis. A month later, PRI merged with Missouri-based St. Joseph Plastics. PRI/St. Joseph and KW Plastics purchase the majority of available PP bales.
The St. Joseph side of the business works closely with PRI for value-added sortation, said Brandon Shaw, marketing manager at PRI. And although virgin PP pricing has risen somewhat this year – which can impact recycled PP pricing – it’s not enough to justify the huge runup in bale values, he said.
“If you’re not taking this back into food grade, it’s really not economical, to be honest, at the moment” to use the plastic in a black compound, Shaw said. He added that his company had yet to see a huge demand pull.
The campaign to collect more of the polymer has also raised the question of whether to sort at the MRF or the end-user level, Rumpke’s Snyder said, adding that, as a MRF operator, he would prefer to be able to provide both food-grade and non-food-grade PP, which would help direct the higher-priced material to more profitable end uses.
As with any recycled commodity, bale yield is crucial and can vary from MRF to MRF, especially when a facility first increases production, Shaw said. Nevertheless, curbside bales typically contain about 60% PP, and when prices increase and yields stay the same or even decrease, profitability takes a hit.
That said, integrating artificial intelligence has significantly advanced plastics sorting. “So the investment in technology and the way technology has evolved to identify substrates, specifically in the AI realm, has really helped out a lot,” Snyder said.