Bill O’Grady — a former board member and influential chairman of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, a current board member of Resource Recycling, a longtime executive at California recycling company Talco Plastics and, according to him, a man who wandered into the industry decades ago essentially by accident — is possibly, probably, most likely retiring this year.

“I’d like to say that. I’ve planted that seed as far back as, I’d say, maybe three years ago, and I’m still here,” O’Grady said during an interview in February. He was in the thick of regulatory reporting and other duties he felt obligated to see through to the end. But the chance to travel and spend more time with his three grandchildren beckoned.

“I’d like to be doing a lot less by the summer months,” he said, though he might make periodic appearances a few times a year after that. “It’d be hard for me to admit that I’m going to leave the plastics community entirely.”

Steve Alexander, APR president and CEO, said as chairman, O’Grady led APR’s transition from a volunteer organization to a professionally managed one, which included Alexander’s hiring in 2005. Alexander called him “an icon in plastics recycling” and mentor whose vision made APR into an internationally recognized trade association. (APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc.)

“You could argue he’s one of the very few people who are responsible for the plastic recycling industry to be where it is today,” Alexander said. “No one has done more to advance the cause of plastics recycling.”

O’Grady had a knack for building consensus even among competitors, as many APR members are, said J. Scott Saunders, general manager at KW Plastics Recycling Division in Alabama and another APR board member. He said the ability to herd cats was essential to APR’s carrying on through its split from the American Chemistry Council.

“Without Bill’s leadership, I believe the whole organization would have stumbled and fallen apart,” Saunders told Resource Recycling. “We’re going to miss him, man, and the industry is going to be very different without him.”

Nicole Janssen, president of Denton Plastics in Oregon and a member of the APR and Resource Recycling boards, said O’Grady has always been someone whom she looked up to and who shared long discussions about the industry’s values and outlooks.

“He has helped me to grow as an industry leader,” she wrote in an email. “I’m proud to call him a friend as well.”

Looking back, looking ahead

Before his rise to APR’s heights, O’Grady was studying veterinary medicine and other sciences in college, he said. Then his family bought a small recycling company in Santa Ana, California, and asked him to help run it. He agreed, settled in, and when the opportunity came along to turn back to the veterinary field, he let it pass by.

“I kind of got into recycling by default,” O’Grady said. “I felt a sense of accomplishment because I was doing something that I actually believed in.”

Years later, in 1995, he moved on to Talco, an extruder and pelletizer focused primarily on polystyrene and polyolefins, where O’Grady serves as vice president and general manager overseeing the company’s post-consumer division in Long Beach and its Corona facility. O’Grady joined the APR board shortly after.

“Certainly, the landscape has changed over my tenure,” O’Grady said of the industry. “It’s gone from a very fledgling, nondescript environment to a very succinct and structured environment—in terms of public perspective, industry perspective, brand owner perspective, consumer product perspective.”

With that maturation, however, have come challenges that must be addressed, he said:

• Chemical recycling

“The biggest challenge today of course would probably be the relationship with chemical recycling versus mechanical recycling, and how that relates to the sustainability of the industry overall,” O’Grady said.

“It needs to prove itself,” he went on, so that the benefits of chemical and mechanical approaches can be weighed and compared. The Recycling Partnership took a similar tack in its February position statement on the burgeoning industry, which has drawn skepticism from a wide range of recycling and environmental groups.

“We need more clarity, and the chemical recyclers need to be accountable,” O’Grady said.

• Dollars and sense of PCR

O’Grady also pointed to the fluctuating market dynamics of post-consumer resin, which has become more appealing to brands with high-profile sustainability targets but often comes with a higher price tag or other challenges.

“We’re facing the need to continually promote the value and use of PCR across the board,” he said, including by emphasizing that this value stretches beyond cost savings. “There’s no simple solution to that, obviously, but the end user has to come to grips with the fact that post-consumer materials do not compete very well with virgin resin.”

• Changing infrastructure

On a related point, O’Grady said that as a materials reclaimer he’s seen firsthand the gap between collection infrastructure and rising PCR demand. He pointed to moves by waste hauling companies like WM and Republic Services to extend their reach further down the post-consumer chain as a potential game-changer.

“It remains to be seen” what impact those investments will have on the plastic recycling industry overall, he said. “It could alter the landscape considerably in terms of sourcing product for post-consumer application.”

• Plastic recycling’s reputation

The very concept of plastic recycling and its motivations increasingly have come under fire, echoing the pushback that helped spark the original plastic recycling push decades ago. Critics point to the global environmental footprint of all plastic production and the enormous variety of polymers that recycling at scale has failed to capture—the “fraud of plastic recycling,” as a widely cited report from the Center for Climate Integrity recently put it.

O’Grady said misinformation and misinterpretation are painting a negative picture of his industry, which “can diminish the value of plastic recycling and the use of plastic material.”

“We need to proactively advocate the benefits of plastics and plastic recycling rather than react to the flavor of the day, so to speak,” he said. “And I think we need to dispel some of this negativity or some of this fear of using plastics.

“I don’t think in my lifetime we’re going to get rid of plastic,” O’Grady added. “It’s here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.”

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Plastics Recycling Update. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

A spate of recent laws in various states set lofty goals for both recycling materials and putting that recycled content back into new products. However, the infrastructure and industry are not at the right scale to meet those statute-mandated goals, and that could spell legal and financial trouble for producers. Those producers have a few options to consider, but action must be decided on soon, as some of the deadlines are already in play.

The recycling industry knows that recycling is not just about plastics; however, for legislators, plastics are at the forefront of recycling policy. Whether it’s California’s SB 54 pushing toward a 25% source reduction in plastic packaging, or the minimum post-consumer recycled content standards in California, New Jersey and Washington, plastics are widely seen as the issue driving policy.

The good news in this is that solving for increased recovery of plastics will bring solutions that improve the system that also delivers paper, glass and metals to recycling facilities, as they all take a ride in the bin in residential curbside recycling programs. However, as extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging are being implemented in California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon, we are years away from seeing major increases in recycling rates in those states. That leaves a significant gap between the demand for recycled material, particularly plastic, and the available supply. Combine that gap with the coming post-consumer resin (PCR) standards, and there is a major issue ahead with respect to the mismatch of supply and demand, and it has legal ramifications.

Right now, the cumulative demand for PCR from the three state laws plus the voluntary commitments to use PCR by brands far exceeds current availability of PCR. A study published in 2022 by Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS) found that the U.S. would need an additional 140 materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to close the gap and meet the demand that is already being expressed for PCR, including PET, HDPE and PP. That does not include possible new policy drivers that could further widen this gap.

New Jersey’s Recycled Content Law states in its purpose statement, “By requiring manufacturers to utilize post-consumer recycled content, markets for such materials are enhanced as demand shifts from virgin to recycled sources. Recycling relies heavily on supply and demand to keep the industry afloat. As oil prices decrease so do prices for virgin plastic which subsequently decrease the demand for recycled materials. Requiring manufacturers to meet minimum recycled content requirements helps to stabilize markets, increase the resiliency of the recycling industry when oil prices fluctuate, and shield municipal recycling programs from the volatility of the cost to recycle.”

Really? The legislature placed a heavy burden on this one law. While indeed the demands are real, can this drive the level of investment needed to expand infrastructure, encourage participation, reduce contamination in residential streams and align material with optimal end markets? I think not.

Further, no company makes packaging destined for a particular state, or for that matter, three states. So, to meet the demands of California, New Jersey and Washington, companies need to meet these standards across their national portfolios. That requires a level of supply that simply will not be realized in time for the compliance requirements.

Many brand commitments are coming due in 2025 and the state laws have schedules that require achievement of various levels of PCR on an aggressive calendar. For example, California will require beverage containers to include 25% PCR by January 2025 and 50% PCR by 2030. New Jersey has requirements for plastics, paper and glass. It requires glass packaging to meet a 35% PCR content standard this year. To say that is impossible is a colossal understatement.

Washington’s law notes that the regulations for the bill begin in 2023 and each product category is phased in with increasing post-consumer recycled content (PCRC) requirements over the next fifteen years. Further, it adds that by 2036, all packaging for covered product categories must include at least 50% PCRC, excluding trash bags, which have a 20% requirement after 2027.

“Each year, producers must report on minimum post-consumer recycled content (PCRC) requirements from the previous year,” the law notes. “The minimum requirements began for beverage and trash bag producers in 2023. Household cleaning and personal care products will start in 2025, and dairy milk and wine sold in small 187 ml bottles will begin in 2029.”

The market is expected to evolve rapidly to make all of this new PCR available, and as you have already figured out, I am skeptical this will happen.

We can certainly talk about how these laws fail to reflect the reality of how recycling markets work, but right now that discussion is only useful in terms of informing how we should engage as new proposals are considered. These laws are already in effect now, so the challenge here is what can industry do to help ensure compliance? In my estimation, something will need to shift dramatically over the coming years, or we are going to hit a “compliance wall.”

What are the options? Multiple industry segments could align and double down on supporting EPR to increase recycling rates and then go back to regulators and say, “look, we’re doing all we can, so can we slow this down?” Would this take the form of working in some of the largest states, say New York and Texas, or would it look more like a federal solution? Do we organize an effort to push back the compliance timelines without the sincere effort to push up recycling rates first? I suspect this would be costly, poorly received and highly likely to fail. Do we run out the timelines, fail to comply and see what happens?

The answer here is elusive, but one thing is for sure: pretending the problem isn’t there will not solve it. Sectors spanning CPG, beverage, personal care, household products and retailers need to engage in dialogue and test where there may be common interest and a possible way forward that all can engage with and support.

Companies often set audacious goals and then fail to meet them. In those cases, a company can always shift the narrative, explain away the failure and earn favor by setting yet another goal. It’s different for regulations. Failure to achieve these requirements comes with financial penalties. In the case of California, the law sets penalties at a rate of $0.20 per pound based on the shortfall of recycled content used compared to the minimum content requirement.

In the past, policy has forced companies to think more about their packaging and its impacts, it has also driven innovation and a collective response around implementation. This momentum needs to be harnessed now and focused in a constructive way on a collaborative effort to offer and support solutions to the PCR compliance wall challenge.

Michael Washburn is principal and owner at Washburn Consulting: Sustainability & Public Affairs.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Plastics Recycling Update. Subscribe today for access to all print content.