Attendees ‘break a bale,’ learning about how textiles are sorted for recycling and reuse during a session at the 2025 Plastics Recycling Conference. | Big Wave Photography/Resource Recycling
About 2,150 industry professionals participated in kicking off the 2025 Plastics Recycling Conference just outside of Washington, D.C., talking business in the exhibit hall and listening to sessions on textile recovery, procurement and policy.
Hosted by Resource Recycling, Inc., the 20th annual Plastics Recycling Conference is being held this week at the Gaylord National hotel in National Harbor, Maryland. It drew stakeholders from across the plastics recycling and textile recovery industries to discuss key ways to move forward.
Textile experts meet in inaugural event
In the Textile Recovery Summit, attendees in one crowded session had the chance to dig through real bales of donated clothing to try their hand at sorting textiles by composition and most fitting end market, as those in the industry must do every day. For example, would it be better off in a nice vintage store or cut into rags?
“There’s a lot of value in the textiles we use every day,” said Marisa Adler, a senior consultant at RRS who moderated the session and partnered with Resource Recycling, Inc. to organize the summit. Sorting is maximizing that value, she added, and sorting methods must continue advancing as textiles and end markets evolve.
“Big picture here, we’re generating lots of textiles, and we’re not doing a very good job of recovering it,” she said.
Later that afternoon, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, spoke with summit attendees about the House’s Slow Fashion Caucus, a small group of legislators that she launched last year to focus on reducing, repairing, re-wearing and recycling textiles in contrast to the fast-fashion industry.
Thrift shops and sturdy, long-lasting and frequently repaired garments are constants of Maine life, Pingree said. They’re also a way to make textiles more environmentally friendly and support domestic jobs and economies.
She’s exploring the idea of federal EPR and national standards for textiles, such as with labeling, to lighten the burden of textile management for local governments and support existing textile processors. She said she’s also eager to learn more from stakeholders throughout the value chain.
“No one wants to make more regulations, but I do think people like predictability,” Pingree said in an interview afterward. And while many observers see EPR as a strictly state-government realm, she thought the pendulum could swing back as concerns over plastics and landfill space keep building.
“I just think a lot of those may hit a tipping point,” she said.
AI-enabled material sourcing
A packed Monday morning workshop explored new ways of handling recycled material procurement.
Shannon Gordon, chief operating officer at PCR sourcing platform Circular.co, said her company is using emerging technology to solve key obstacles to a smoother procurement process.
“Part of what we’re trying to tackle with Circular is the fragmented, opaque, analog, really unpredictable nature of this market, with perceived high premiums that prevent people from transacting or moving forward,” Gordon said. That process, she said, “can be undone.”
Circular.co is using AI-equipped technology to do what Gordon said is “simple to explain, a little bit more challenging to execute.” In essence, the technology takes a lot of disparate data in inaccessible formats and non-standardized metrics, then uses AI to “codify and normalize it,” Gordon said. Circular.co has used that information to build software that streamlines recycled material sourcing. It allows buyers to run a digital sourcing model that compiles information in days instead of months.
“With this software and some of these techniques and some creative thinking on the brand and converter side as well as with processors, we’re able to make this a much more accessible market, increasing transaction volume,” Gordon said.
Also on the procurement side, major brands for much of the past year have reported disappointing results and lowered goalposts in their recyclability and post-consumer resin usage goals, generally pointing to difficulties in supply and procurement. But slower-than-expected progress is still progress, an ICIS analyst said during a Monday session on recycled plastics trends and forecasts – and that improvement is likely to continue.
With corporate goals, extended producer responsibility policies and other factors taken into account, Americas team lead and senior analyst Andrea Bassetti projected that PCR’s share of total plastic consumption will roughly double for PET, from more than 20% this year to more than 40% in 2050, and rise less but still significantly for polyolefins, from around 11% to around 16%.
“The current rate of possible progress has been set,” she said.
Producer responsibility dominates policy discussions
At the Policy Trends: Shaping the Future of Recycling session Monday afternoon, Kate Bailey, chief policy officer of APR and Resa Dimino, a managing partner at Signalfire discussed the dozens of bills in play this year that affect the recycling industry.
Dimino is watching extended producer responsibility for packaging bills in Washington, Maryland and New York most closely. Regarding Washington, she said that “we’re hopeful that that will move forward.”
“There has been so much work over the last few years to incorporate the perspectives of the various stakeholders,” Dimino added.
Bailey noted the rapid change in policy that’s occurred in the last several years.
“It was hard to even have a conversation about EPR five years ago in a lot of places, so it is really night and day difference,” she said. “In so many states, EPR is moving forward, and there are especially exciting, interesting, fast moving times on implementation.”
Touching on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent decision to send SB 54 implementation back to the rulemaking stage, Bailey said she doesn’t see that as a warning sign for EPR in the U.S. more broadly, especially because the California law is “strikingly different than the other states.”
“The message that I would like to share is Oregon is on track, Colorado is on track, Minnesota, Maine, these states are moving forward. That conversation is not going to change,” Bailey added.
The session also covered PCR mandates, how EPR is spreading to conservative states and across material categories, and the differences between U.S. and Canadian policy pushes.
Awards from APR
At the opening plenary, The Association of Plastic Recyclers announced the winners of its inaugural Recycling Leadership Awards. APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., the publisher of this newsletter.
They are:
- Outstanding Leadership Award: Debra Wilson, material science director at Berry Global
- Recycling Technology Innovation Award: UNIFI
- Package Design Innovation Award: Colgate-Palmolive
- PCR Utilization Award: KW Container