Film and flexible packaging recycling faces compounding infrastructure, market and policy barriers.
The dynamics driving and stalling film and flexibles recovery were the subject of a Northeast Recycling Council webinar. Industry stakeholders from the Flexible Film Recycling Alliance (FFRA), the US Flexible Film Initiative (USFFI), Delterra, The Recycling Partnership (TRP), and Circular Action Alliance (CAA) discussed the state of film and flexibles recovery from collection through end markets.
Conversation quickly turned to California and its leadership role, spurred by the 2022 passage of SB 54, the state’s extended producer responsibility law which mandates that all packaging sold in the state be recyclable or compostable by 2032. It also sets 2032 goals for producers, including reducing single-use plastic by 25% and a 65% recycling rate for single-use plastic packaging and food service ware.
“A lot of our attention right now is getting California right, so that when other states pass [EPR] we can follow a similar model if we’ve implemented it correctly,” said Roxanne Spiekerman, national plastics director at CAA, referring to the EPR aspect of the state law that shifts the burden of paying for recycling from local and state government to the producers of products. Six other states have passed EPR for packaging in the US.
Spiekerman noted that the latest figures from CalRecycle found film and flexibles are only being recycled at a rate of less than 5% in the state, meaning there is a long way to go to get to 65% by 2032.
“We talk about flexible films as if they are a monolith, when in fact we have a wide diversity of flexible films, and that impacts what we can and can’t do, and what our success rate is,” said Kyla Fisher, sustainability consultant with the FFRA.
She noted that three times more commercial film is being recycled than post-consumer films. There is also relatively low confidence in the recycling system for this material, Fisher said, among legislators, consumers and brands.
“When individuals, organizations are challenging the idea of recycling, they’re challenging at a collection standpoint,” Fisher said. That’s why Fisher’s organization is developing a third party validation process so people can verify if the material they drop off ultimately gets recycled.
Maite Quinn, executive director of the USFFI and the president of Resource Recycling Inc. (publisher of Plastics Recycling Update), said USFFI is focused on “demonstrating that recycling film and flexible plastic packaging at the MRF is possible when operational subsidies are paid to the MRFs and the reclaimers.”
She added, “Our work is really centered around one core question: what does it actually financially take to move flexible film from the curbside stream through to the reclaimers successfully?”
The technologies exist to recycle these materials, Quinn said. The trick is to get the economics and the policy support right.
Today, most of the film showing up at MRFs is incidental, said Quinn.
“There’s a lot of film that is being wishcycled into these MRFs,” she said. In fact, since December 2025 “we’ve moved over 1.5 million pounds of film and flexible material from the MRFs to the reclaimers.”
All of that material has provided a lot of learning, said Quinn. And a key lesson is the importance of contracts, she said, to add stability in terms of supply and downstream buyers.
“Contracts are a powerful catalyst for investment,” she said.
Katherine Huded, TRP’s executive director of strategic engagement, said California won’t get to its 65% recycling rate overnight.
“But we know that we can get there, and it’s got to be with time and with data-backed solutions and the right investments,” she said.
Huded explained that her group is injecting capital and technical assistance across the supply chain.
Shannon Bouton, Delterra CEO, said the existing industry in California is not prepared for the large influx of film and flexibles that are expected in the coming years as SB 54 ramps up.
“This is not yet a mature market,” she said.
In Europe, the industry has been working with this material for decades, supported by longtime EPR programs. Delterra is working with consultancy firm Eunomia on an initiative to find new products made with recycled materials in the US, beyond plastic lumber and asphalt. This work includes building the business case, “so that we can understand what financial mechanisms will be required to sort of start to scale this use of the material,” Bouton said.
Fisher added that consumer behavior is an important piece of the puzzle.
“We’ve spent 20 years training consumers to drop their films off at store collection depots,” she said, adding she wouldn’t want to see an end to those programs before curbside collection of the material is scaled up successfully. Plus, different collection systems may result in different qualities of materials, which then have different end uses.
In the current environment those end uses require subsidies to compete against virgin resins, the panelists agreed. Quinn added that subsidies that give reclaimers flexibility to respond to changing economic conditions can be most effective.
Data gaps, panelists said, remain one of the biggest obstacles to understanding where the recycling system is breaking down.
Fisher noted that better data collection is expected from the EPR states, leaving a possible void across the rest of the map. Working with trade organizations and private companies to share data could help close that gap, she said.
Fisher added that it’s important to remember that films and flexibles serve valuable purposes in the market, in terms of making food last longer and reducing weight.
“While I think there’s design opportunities for us to maybe move towards mono materials, or some of those other aspects of things we do need to be really cautious that in the push for recyclability we’re not forgetting the overall lifecycle of a product and where its value comes in,” she said.
