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First-person perspective: Market-driven solutions to precious-metals supply

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

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Joaquin Corbalan P/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the September 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Global growth in uptake of electric vehicles, semiconductors, fuel cells, battery panels, medical devices and other products and components is fueling heightened demand for precious metals. Manufacturers of a diverse range of products favor these metals for their superior electrical conductivity, corrosion resistance, hardness and a range of other valuable qualities.

At the same time, precious metals are a limited natural resource. It is not uncommon for mines in South Africa, for example, to plunge 2 or 3 kilometers into the ground to reach their deposits. Many major mining operations around the world are advanced in their life cycles. While exploration for new sources is ongoing, the price of such efforts is very high.

Of course, the approaching shortage of precious metals is problematic not only from the perspective of simple industrial supply and demand; there also is the devastating impact on our environment and human well-being to be taken into account. According to a February 2022 research briefing to the U.K. Parliament, “Mining and mineral processing consume large volumes of water, including in arid regions. The discharge of water from mine sites can result in serious contamination of waterways. The industry uses over 8% of the world’s total energy each year to produce metals, and contributes to 10% of the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Improper storage of mine waste has resulted in humanitarian and ecological disasters.”

The mining of precious metals in particular involves long-established and well-understood methods and high safety standards, making it a much smaller contributor to environmental issues than some base metal or rare-earth mining operations. However, according to a study published by the International Platinum Association in 2023, the carbon footprint of recycled precious metals is still more than 90% less than primary mining.

Recovering Vs. Mining Precious Metals

There are so many recoverable precious metals — gold, iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium and silver — that are being wasted today.

The World Health Organization has referred to e-scrap — computers, household appliances, medical devices, mobile phones, etc. — as “the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world,” of which only 17.4% was documented as formally collected and recycled. E-scrap typically contains precious metals such as gold and silver as well as platinum group metals, depending on the kind of material.

By contrast, the majority of waste and spent catalysts from industrial production worldwide is a ready source of recoverable metals that is already being recycled.

Even slightly improving the ratio of the precious metals that are recovered in various ways relative to those that are mined would offer tremendous, varied and widely shared benefits. To date, the relative complexities associated with recovering precious metals have made the process only a limited player in industry’s plans for attaining the resources that it needs. Market-driven trends, however, are changing the equation.

Changing Business Models

Primary among those trends is that the math of recovering versus mining precious metals is evolving.

As we see the various in-demand precious metals grow more scarce, we also are seeing those metals grow more expensive. Ironically, the trend toward scarcity will improve the business models for processes such as refurbishing and repurposing of components that utilize precious metals, and for more efficiently and effectively recycling recoverable metals from production scrap.

Many smartphones, for example, currently end up in landfills and/or incineration plants around the world; however, as the metals that mobile phones require grow more expensive to mine and procure, it will fuel a greater economic incentive to spur reuse of the devices. The potential impact on sustainability of a large-scale and global shift from discarding to reusing phones would be profound.

Furthermore, mining is inefficient and expensive relative to recycling. There are variables to be factored around the vein of the ore, but, in most cases, 1 ton of mined gold ore can be expected to yield about 5 grams of gold, while 1 ton of cell phones, about 10,000 units, could offer up to 280 grams of gold.

Changing Customer Demands

In many cases, manufacturers of products that rely on precious metals have new demands that are forcing change in the ways that they are sourced. Buyers in multiple industries are becoming more demanding of “conflict-free” resources via mineral sourcing programs that take into account human rights, environmental impact and ethics — as well as supplies that are sourced by less environmentally damaging means.

Plus, supply-chain disruptions in recent years have crystallized manufacturers’ attention on sourcing precious metals and other supplies geographically from nearer to where they will be processed. In this way, operations are rendered less vulnerable to geopolitical issues, and manufacturers potentially gain greater control over and visibility into their supply.

Consequently, recycling is moving closer to recovering and refining bases, enabling, for example, precious metals to be reclaimed from metal fragments and other waste generated during a manufacturing process. Integrating recovery and refining of precious metals with the manufacture of industrial precious metals products in this way can greatly contribute to sustainability and help ensure a steady supply of pure resources.

Indeed, decentralization in the recycling industry is key to reducing global reliance on mining. Increasingly, the precious metals industry is moving away from the traditional, CapEx-intensive solutions such as electric and plasma arc furnaces, which depend on very high utilization to turn a profit, and toward more environmentally friendly technologies. Relying on, for example, hydrometallurgical solutions that utilize chemical or microbial techniques facilitates the deployment of recycling operations next to where scrap is being generated and where the recovered precious metals are going to be used.

Ultimately, it’s likely to be these sorts of market-driven reforms that will drive real, lasting solutions to the world’s precious metals supply issues.

If properly recycled, there are significant amounts of valuable and finite resources to be reaped from e-scrap. Precious metal raw materials that are 100% recycled today are challenging to achieve without substantially more recovery, so it is crucial to grow understanding of precious metal recovery across manufacturers and general consumers alike.

Bodo Albrecht is president of Tanaka Precious Metals (Americas), responsible for all operations in North, Central, and South America, including sales, distribution and support for all Tanaka products in close cooperation with manufacturing, marketing, technical, research and development and related operations in Asia. He is a precious metals executive with deep roots in the industry, as well as in rare earth elements and strategic metals, with 20 years of international management positions with Degussa AG and 15 years running a consulting firm, BASIQ Corporation, before joining Tanaka.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

Reaching for circularity

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

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3rdtimeluckystudio/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the September 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series exploring the concept of circularity. Part 1 was published in the August issue.

“It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, it goes up and down and around.” –Kevin Nealon as Gary Potter in “Happy Gilmore.”

In part 1 of this article, we explored the appeal of circularity and the circular economy as powerful principles of materials management, envisioning the endless cycling of package materials to reach the goal of conservation/containment of energy and material inputs — a materials management system that emulates natural stable systems, such as a mature forest, where carbon levels are balanced, and the amount of carbon naturally released in the form of gas is equal to the amount stored by the reservoir of tree and plant biomass. Everything falling to the forest floor becomes usable carbon food, which is cycled up into living trees, plants, bacteria and fungi in a closed, homeostatic system requiring the lowest productivity and inputs needed for forest resiliency and diversity.

The deep metaphorical power of circularity and the circular economy mimicking healthy natural systems led it to replace the old, more linear waste management hierarchy in the public sphere, providing a more inspiring path toward mitigating the unsustainable environmental impacts of resource consumption.

Recycling is a strategy often connected to circularity. They comparatively present an opportunity for further exploration. Recycling functions as a last resort that seems to accept the fact of mass consumption but works to mitigate it by capturing remaining value — whether monetary, energy, lower emissions or reduced carbon before disposal. Recycling and circularity can be seen as two related but separate goods, one a tactical method of salvage that aims for convenience, the other a framework for sustaining resources and lowering energy use. However, at the nexus of recycling and circularity are troubling real-world paradoxes.

However related, residential package recycling today meanders around but does not approach lofty circular tenets. Its approach to managing end-of-life materials stretches far back into human history to hunters and gatherers, when usefulness of an object diminished, lesser uses were found, or the material was consumed as fuel. In the present day, recycling of materials like paper and packaging is more of an open, linear system and business process, not a cycle of something valuable. It may be improved by using underlying principles of circularity, but circularity cannot be sustained for physical reasons through recycling — it can only get closer to that ideal. Implemented by free market actors, public programs, policymakers and other recycling supply chain players, recycling captures whatever it can for remanufacturing into beneficial products, with the uncollected or misprocessed materials being disposed of or lost.

RESIDENTIAL PACKAGE RECYCLING’S ROLE

For package recycling, the gold standard of circularity is arguably when materials are turned back into the same product. This is much less common than recognized and is found most often in materials with high captured energy and durability, like metals and paper fibers. Further, material consumption is not stopped by recycling, it is only slowed, and the residential recycling supply chain rarely closes the circle for any type of commonly recycled package. The powerful implication is that use of extracted virgin materials will continue on a massive scale for most packaging.

Yet we come not to bury recycling but to raise its absolute necessity, and with it, the need to finance and improve it for more material capture. We do, however, question the facile use of “circularity,” especially when recycling is pushed as a defining answer to a package’s circularity. Kristian Syberg, an environmental risk researcher at Roskilde University in Denmark, critiqued this tendency from across the globe, writing in Scientific American in 2023 that “attention has been primarily focused on recycling,” but the reality of recycling and the circular ideal is subject to scrutiny and misses the mark of reducing waste. This shows up graphically in some of the conditions recycling finds itself up against:

  • Household recycling rates have not materially improved for over 20 years despite more investment and the popularity of residential single stream recycling. As such, the base of any new potential cycle of materials is continually diminishing, a dwindling spiral that necessitates more virgin extraction.
  • Even with the high-value, energy-trapping aluminum can, 40% were still thrown away despite their value in 2020, according to The Aluminum Association, an industry group.
  • Persistent gaps in access and behavior, due to a fundamentally flawed system of properly financing material collection, result in almost 4 of every 5 generated tons being lost to disposal.
  • Extended producer responsibility laws are designed to address the system financing issue, but so far only five U.S. states have passed EPR for packaging.
  • According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, less than 20% of plastics enters the recycling stream and only 9% actually is recycled.

In addition to these overall system challenges, recycling circularity faces unavoidable physical limitations. Let’s examine one of the best cases of recycling circularity in the package recycling stream: aluminum cans. Other materials like glass and steel compare favorably with cans in the limited inherent loss of material in each remanufacturing cycle, but aluminum cans are much more likely to cycle back to their original form. Cardboard cycles well back to original form but material damage in each cycle limits the total cycles to around seven times, whereas can cyclability can be as high as 12-20 times.

The refining of pure aluminum requires distilling from bauxite ore, converting highly variable inputs into purified molecules of alumina, which are refined by chemical electrolysis requiring huge amounts of electricity. Newly formed pig aluminum then goes through a series of alloying and/or coatings through furnaces or chemical baths. Specific can sheet or top alloys are then painted and/or labeled to be used in the packaging process. When captured for recycling, the high energy concentration in the original product production is saved. However, if can material recyclability is limited to 20 times at best; by the end of the 20th cycle, the input of high energy concentrated virgin materials will have reached 100%. Thus, even in this best case, continued virgin material extraction is an unavoidable outcome.

The force that prevents true circularity is the same one that works against all structured systems in nature: entropy. The groundwork of entropic effects on circularity is laid even before collection in the design of packaging. From that point forward, through the entire recycling supply chain, including collection, processing and remanufacturing, entropy weighs heavily on package recyclability and its circularity. Let’s unpackage that further.

Today’s newer packaging formats have a complexity that inherently makes them less recyclable, while design trends seem to be working against recovery through recycling:

Downgauging. This umbrella concept encompasses using thinner gauge materials but also adjusting package size while maintaining functionality and quality until discard. Both trends have affected highly recyclable packaging. Steel cans and PET bottles have become at least 30% lighter, thinner or smaller over the last 20 years, and aluminum cans in the last 50 years have become lighter by half.

Downgauging is a very circular-economy practice, reducing material consumption and increasing efficiency through net savings on materials and energy. But it makes the return of materials to use harder and more expensive. Like reduce and reuse, recycling benefits from higher durability, which runs counter to common upstream sustainability and efficiency efforts. As McKinsey & Company wrote in 2020, brands and packagers “will have to face complicated trade-offs such as recyclability versus carbon footprint.” Some brands with lofty circularity goals seem to understand the dilemma and are now publicly announcing alternative carbon metrics over recyclability.

Multi-material packaging. Package system choices trend toward customization to increase benefits such as barrier and taste protection, structural efficiency and shopping aisle appeal. It is not surprising that for the most malleable material, up to 20% of plastic packaging is multi-material or multi-layered. The benefits of custom packaging are real and include safety, food preservation and longer shelf life — all these connecting to circular principles around efficient use of resources. However, multiple layers complicate recycling by adding variables to the primary targeted material to be captured through cross-contamination.

Packages utilizing materials with new chemistries and formats. Many new packages may be worth recycling (i.e., carbon capture or energy saving positive), but each new input into mixed recyclables for processing is marginal, and can result in increased contamination cost, scale inefficiency, and lack of local markets. Examples include complex forms of flexible packaging, the ever-changing cosmetic and home health package segment, ultra-convenient one-step delivery systems, and an array of food service packaging items, some having very good recycling characteristics, some of which do not.

The upshot is that conscious brand packaging design choices add entropy to the package recycling system. Although cardinal materials for packaging may still predominate in today’s packaging systems, the trends outlined above multiply against each other with deleterious effect. A key corollary of these trends is that the pace of packaging innovation has constantly outpaced the ability of residential recycling’s business and technological model to keep up. This may be the reason growing numbers of brands are now actively postponing or adjusting their recyclability and content goals downward.

AN IMPERFECT RECYCLING PROCESS

A natural part of the package recycling process from collection to remanufacturing is loss in material yield and purity from the inevitable entropy from each refinement process to reach the same package function. This system of collection and processing, through the complexity and impacts of sortation and separation to pure commodities, can be illustrated through some of the following examples:

  • After packaging serves its useful function, some of it is placed in ultra-convenient household recycling carts. But data indicates that homeowners don’t always recycle all their recyclables, perhaps in part due to the challenge of making them clean and dry.
  • Misleading labels and recycling messages cause “wish-cycling” of non-recyclable items. These contaminating materials erode the system’s ability to move material-sorted recyclables to remanufacturing due to chemistry, complexity or lack the scale for removal in the system.
  • Recycling collection’s efficiencies optimize material deliveries at low cost but also add entropy by mixing and densification. Compaction of materials en route flattens, crushes, deforms and pushes disparate materials into each other, degrading, decaying and cross-contaminating target materials.
  • Mixed-material recycling processes introduce more entropy as unloading and sortation misdirect or similarly degrade some materials.
  • Reclamation and manufacturing steps for reusing the material contribute further to the loss in packaging yield per cycle, i.e., everything from re-sorting to furnace losses, fines loss and the need to improve chemical properties through dilution and so on.

The final non-circular reality is that too many materials do not ever return to the same product due to things like costs, material color, chemical composition, contamination, lost durability or specialization. Most of what we consider to be recycling is actually downcycling. The reason that packages tend to downcycle is materials used lose their purity or other characteristics in each run through the cycle, and repairing to their original condition can be prohibitive. Examples abound, such as post-consumer food-contact PET made into carpet fiber; glass recycled into fiberglass or used as alternative landfill cover (especially where there is no glass bottle manufacturing), colored HDPE containers made into piping, and mixed aluminum container bales going into lower-quality ingots.

It’s not that downcycling is a bad thing — it still reduces virgin materials, saves energy, lowers emissions and captures carbon, but it begs questions around circularity, especially when the downcycled products are not typically recycled at scale. Carpet and textile recycling happen at a small scale nationally, and few programs exist to recycle fiberglass insulation or drainage pipe.

So recycling is not a closed loop, and the benefits of recycling material are not endless but only finite inputs that diminish with each cycle through the system so that total loss is achieved in a determinate number of cycles. Though the battle for better yield from the residential package recycling process is continually waged throughout the recycling supply chain, there is simply not yet enough energy or financial capability in the system to close the losses. Ironically, as capture and recycling of material increases, getting to a pure cycling of materials with little to no loss may have infinite costs and not be desirable due to the effort required.

This is clearly a pessimistic characterization, but every step in the recycling process — reaching all the way back to design — is improvable, and clear steps can be taken that will lead us closer to the circular chimera. Many of the tactics for circular strengthening are well-known but we still need new, broader and more robust approaches. Remembering that the battle against entropy in material circularity is a product of conscious business and political decision-making choices, to provide the proper motivation and sense of urgency, we remind readers that if we keep consuming increasingly complex materials at the same rate, the powerful forces of entropy will guarantee ongoing high-impact, high-energy of virgin material extraction and use, all of which will make it extremely difficult to sustain nature or help cool the planet.

There are some essential steps forward we can take.

First, bring back “reduce and reuse.” As observed by the World Economic Forum, “in a properly built circular economy, one should rather focus on avoiding the recycling stage at all costs. It may sound straightforward, but preventing waste from being created in the first place is the only realistic strategy.” Here we come full circle back to the old waste management hierarchy that prioritized reduce, reuse and recycle, with the first two being the only true circular methods for reducing waste that bring the highest benefits to the environment. It is high time to push these strategies to funded policy and into brand business models. The recent move to EPR is beginning to create a long-needed bridge to do just that. Along with deposit recycling systems, enforcement components and supply chains to reduce and reuse are taking hold, a highly welcome development. Finally, brands still have, and are constantly working on, the many opportunities to pursue waste reduction upstream by addressing the size of formats for product delivery and product/package ratios. Efforts downstream to make reusable or more durable package formats and minimization of materials that simply become waste traveling through the recycling process need similar attention.

Second, accountable circularity metrics throughout the package supply chain could help even the playing field where circularity features are more highly favored:

  • Create enforceable design metrics that measure and reward brands for packaging reductions, reuse potential and recyclability in a cumulative, hierarchical scoring format. This would drive them to do things like maximize material strength and durability for reuse and recycling while consistently moving toward less material complexity and more material uniformity.
  • Insist upon accountable recycled content metrics and clear labeling to both enhance market pull for clean recyclable materials and ensure cleanliness through consumer understanding.
  • Provide easy-to-understand, full greenhouse gas accounting and public incentives as requirements for residential, EPR and deposit recycling programs.

Third, properly finance recycling collection through a combination of EPR, DRS and mandatory recycling ordinances, providing the resourcing and legal motivations needed for universal recycling access and for the educational efforts required to expand clean recycled material stream yields. Meanwhile, properly cost disposal options for all of the externalities in their disposal fees, i.e., long-term emissions and impacts on downstream life systems, so that clear choices can be made.

Lastly, while eco-modulating packaging for recycling-oriented attributes is a tenet in EPR, virgin material eco-modulation could also be used to internalize upstream externalities, minimize material loss and mitigate the impacts of virgin material use. For instance, packaging fees and incentives could help identify and monetize the necessary capital to drive up regenerative conservation, use renewable energy in virgin material production and better control pollutants such as methane from oil and natural gas production.

This two-part article has sought to explicitly recognize the limitations of recycling to meet full circularity, and to challenge recycling professionals to think about the strategies that improve the ability of recycling to contribute to circularity as the final resort before household packaging is disposed of. Our hope is that it also helps build discretion in the current uses of the word circularity to make it become less superficial, i.e., tossing around the goal line of circularity through the method of recycling, which can only partially get us there.

In addition, package recycling supply chain stakeholders must consider making more fervent strides towards reduction in overall waste potential and more complete cycling of materials. They must bring forward real solutions to address the impacts of single-use packaging waste as soon as practicably possible, including mitigating the impacts of continued virgin material use. This will take the resources and further regulatory underpinnings that a circular economy will be based upon. It won’t happen by itself. We need to pay our quarter now for the speed of results to be meaningful.

Michael Timpane has been a partner and vice president with RRS since 2015 and specializes in the recycling supply chain. He has worked for each of the largest post-consumer recycling companies in their time – Reynolds Aluminum, BFI, and WM – for over a decade each in his half-century career.

Scott Mouw is senior advisor for strategy and research with The Recycling Partnership. He comes from a background of public recycling, including directing the state of North Carolina’s recycling program.

2024 elections: Experts dig into industry impact

Published: September 10, 2024
Updated:

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The 2024 U.S. elections are the subject of a four-session webinar series held by the Recycled Materials Association. | Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

The next occupants of Congress and the White House likely will bring changes to corporate taxes, project permits, worker protections and other industry concerns no matter who wins this year’s elections, legal experts said last week during the first of four webinars hosted by the Recycled Materials Association about the 2024 races. But uncertainty still reigns when it comes to who will win, what they’ll be able to accomplish and how states and courts will respond. Continue Reading

First-person Perspective: The power of partnerships

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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Cytonn Photography/Unsplash

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Through partnerships and collaborations, the plastics industry has the opportunity to amplify individual efforts and contributions, pool resources, leverage diverse expertise, channel creativity and drive innovation. All of these are critically important when looking to solve a complex issue such as mismanaged plastic waste and building a circular economy for plastic materials.

For many years, my career at Nova Chemicals has revolved around being a connector to create change, connecting through industry associations, coalitions, consortiums, initiatives, investments, with our customers and their customers, with nonprofits and with governments. I’ve seen firsthand that partnerships and collaborations can help accelerate progress by leveraging expertise and catalyzing investments and innovations to find solutions through private and private/public models. There are three ways partnerships and collaborations can make a difference: investing in recycling infrastructure, encouraging innovation and circular design, and impacting public policy.

Driving Investment

According to The Recycling Partnership, the U.S. alone needs $17 billion investment over five years to deliver the full benefits of recycling to the public, and the estimated return on that investment could be $20 billion over 10 years. Collective investment is an excellent way to deploy catalytic financing into sustainable technologies.

One investment collaboration is the Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund within Closed Loop Partners’ Infrastructure Group. Established in 2021 by Nova Chemicals, LyondellBasell and Dow with Closed Loop Partners, the fund’s mission is to advance the recovery and recycling of polyethylene and polypropylene in the U.S. and Canada to meet growing demand for high-quality, recycled content in products and packaging from consumer brands. The strategy seeks to deploy $55 million and to recycle over 500 million pounds of plastic over the fund’s lifespan.

Since its launch, the strategy has made several catalytic debt and equity investments to both private companies and public organizations, financing post-pilot scale projects that advance collection infrastructure, sortation capabilities, enabling technologies and re-manufacturing of PE and PP. One investment has been in Greyparrot, a leading artificial intelligence waste analytics platform that improves transparency and automation for plastics sortation in recycling facilities. Supported by funding, Greyparrot has grown to now identify over 25 billion waste objects each year, with 100-plus of its Greyparrot Analyzer Units spread across 20 countries, and is working with three of the top eight global waste management companies to improve recycling efficiency and increase resource recovery.

There are several other investment funds focusing on eliminating plastic waste and building a plastic circular economy, including Infinity Recycling, Circulate Capital and The Alliance to End Plastic Waste and Lombard Odier Investment Managers’ circular plastic fund. Recently the U.S. State Department announced the launch of the End Plastic Pollution International Collaborative, an international public-private partnership created to catalyze governments, NGOs and businesses to support innovative solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. All of these are great examples of how we can work together to invest in solutions.

Inspiring Innovation and Circular Design

Designing for circularity has benefited greatly from cross-sector collaborations. The Association of Plastic Recyclers developed the APR Design Guide, a comprehensive design guidance and testing protocol that measure package design against industry-accepted criteria. And the Canada Plastic Pact led a collaborative effort to develop the Golden Design Rules, a guidance and standards framework for Canadian companies to adjust their plastic packaging designs and contribute to a circular plastics economy. Harmonized approaches like these strive to provide alignment and a common framework, ensuring consistency, reducing confusion and improving widespread acceptance while still allowing for flexibility, creativity and innovation.

Recently in Canada, Nova Chemicals launched a Centre of Excellence for Plastics Circularity, a hub for knowledge exchange and technology development for plastics circularity through a new network of industry peers and research institutions. The first call for expression of interest received nearly 50 proposal submissions from Canadian universities and research organizations.

Sharing progress is essential in building momentum and showcasing the innovative solutions that are underway. According to the Global Partners for Plastics Circularity, there are 116 recycling infrastructure projects planned, operational or under construction representing a $18 billion financial investment that plastic makers and the plastics value chain are making around the globe to create a more circular future. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste participated in the fourth session of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee in Ottawa in May, hosting a Solutions Fair that showcased over 40 different solutions to make change and create a plastics circular economy. All happening now. All over the world. And they created a short video to highlight this circularity in action.

Partnerships to Impact Policy

Cross-sector partnerships also can play a crucial role in driving effective policy. Industry and trade associations, coalitions and initiatives can bridge gaps, foster dialogue and enable collective decision-making that finds creative solutions and shared goals by leveraging diverse knowledge and expertise. This can result in sustainable change at scale.

Guiding principles and model legislation are some of the ways these groups can help influence policy decisions and solutions that can transform post-consumer plastics into an ongoing resource. America’s plastic makers have proposed a national and comprehensive strategy toward a plastics circular economy, Five Actions for Sustainable Change, which highlights five critical public policies and actions that can help us achieve success. Innovations and new end market developments are other ways collaborations can stimulate business economics and create the necessary supply and demand for used plastics.

If you want to read more, there are several other long-term roadmaps and frameworks to take us from a linear take-make-waste/dispose economy towards a circular economy for plastics:

What do all of these have in common? They each show the complexity of the situation and the interconnectivity of the players, policies, innovations, infrastructure and supply-demand balance needed to make it all work. There are actions that individual entities can take to move the needle, but at the very heart of the solution is a need for partnerships and collaborations to accomplish this overwhelming but achievable task.

There are many ways partnerships and collaborations are helping us to get closer to a future with zero plastic waste. In my experience, the greatest ideas start with simple conversations. I am excited for the future because I see firsthand that there is a focus, intensity and passion that drives us all towards a common deliverable. It will take time, but I am confident that this collective impact will create lasting change.

Julianne Trichtinger is manager of industry affairs within the government relations team at Nova Chemicals. She works closely with key industry associations and strategic partnerships as an advisor to senior executives and is responsible for monitoring and providing insights into public policy, advocacy priorities and key activities that impact our business and industry, particularly as it relates to a plastics circular economy.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

The ideals and realities of circularity

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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alybaba/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series exploring the concept of circularity. Part 2 is expected to be published in September’s issue.

Circularity has become the predominant but still vague goal for reducing packaging’s impact on the environment, without any direct conversation on what the word means or its limitations. The vagueness actually acts like a protective shield that prevents acknowledging the reality of material utilization and loss, including the unavoidable and overwhelming dependence on virgin feedstocks to make new packaging and its environmental implications. Let’s take a deeper look at circularity and related, overused metaphors in the recycling industry.

Our respective careers allowed us to gain a wide view of the recycling supply chain — the processes from material manufacturer to package manufacturer to brands and finally to retail channels; then to consuming and discarding containers by the public; to separating and prepping those materials at households for collection; then at MRFs and deposit centers for purification into raw materials; and finally to re-manufacturing into products or disposal at landfills. Material captured and cycled back in this process is a complicated journey rarely seen in its totality but is often idealized using the term circularity.

The targeted materials for residential commingled recycling have fundamentally changed with time. For the first time since modern, municipally-funded residential recycling programs began nearly 60 years ago, in a trend starting and accelerating in this century, more packaging than free fiber is now present in commingled materials. Newspapers, mail, printed and mixed writing papers have all declined to a minor fraction of the stream and are still receding from the dual impacts of computer and smartphone technologies. Some outcomes of this change were unexpected and expensive, and mostly borne by local taxpayers.

Until the last 15 or so years, MRFs were still being built around paper processing because that was the primary recycling output. Now they are going through massive re-tooling to capture more packaging and smaller-format materials. China’s market disruptions were caused in part because of an unacceptable amount of post-consumer packaging in bales, creating challenges for processing and price volatility. At the same time, paper packaging such as OCC, boxboard, fiberboard and paperboard became a universal addition to single stream for their value. Recently three-dimensional small- and medium-format fiber packaging, which is gaining prevalence in the stream, is demanding a processing response for proper capture. Sophisticated optical sorters and air-density separators, rather than the older and larger cascading screens, now focus on all sizes of paper packaging. In the current round of the estimated $2 billion to $3 billion in investments in new and retrofitted MRFs that started in the last three years, some facilities have eliminated paper screens altogether. This proves again that owning and operating MRFs is not for the faint of heart.

Similarly, plastic packaging proliferated in the marketplace due to its lower weight, high utility and usually lower cost. Though the pandemic temporarily slowed the amount of plastic in weight consumed by households, and despite some stiff regulations to reduce its use, plastic packaging is returning to pre-pandemic growth levels. The massive availability of cheap virgin petro-feedstocks certainly is an enabler of this process. In addition, this
increasing fraction of potentially recyclable material has become more customized in its various applications. And the fastest growing elements of this stream, film and flexible packaging, pose massive challenges to a recycling system that has not yet finished its last round of transformation. Will that force yet another mass transformation in MRF processing, and how will that be financed?

Plastics especially enjoy a flexibility (pun intended) that makes them more attractive than other more uniform and energy-trapping materials that are ideal for recycling and perhaps more naturally circular. The time from initial design of a new plastic package until it hits the retail environment can be as short as 16 weeks, as Polytainers reported earlier this year, for instance. Additionally, modern household plastic and multi-material packaging are made with an amazing array of increasing chemical, color and shape combinations, regularly achieving reductions in weight per unit. Today, each package’s physical characteristics are curated to provide the lowest cost, be attractive to buyers and provide specific functions, from food preservation to superior display capabilities in retail environments to ease of use.

The relationship between packages and consumers has continued to evolve as well. From a brand and packaging manufacturer point of view, it is easy to see the attractiveness of plastic packaging. Trending industry research has found techniques now common in modern package design that drive new purchases and repurchases at high levels. For instance, super lightweight packages, sometimes twice to three times the size of the delivered material, can extend the field of vision reception for better notice by passing eyes. In this and many other examples, packages catch the eye and present a retentive positive image. Consumer preferences to buy based on these types of packaging may hold sway, regardless of factors like brand loyalty or product satisfaction and overwhelming the rationality of caveat emptor. Packages have now become almost as important as the products they hold and are held up as part of the experience of buying goods or brand names. This increasingly important influence of home product package design has led to rapid shelf turnover and further customization as packages compete for demand.

These trends put more pressure on the entire material supply chain to respond, all the way to residential recycling programs and MRFs, who feel constant pressure to expand material acceptance, typically without any funding to facilitate acceptance or cover marginal costs for new packages. The most important implication is that packaging design innovates at a pace that outstrips the pace of recycling innovation and leaves little room or time to adequately explore trade-offs like package durability, such as for reuse, or like recyclability and yield — thus leaving open massive questions around how to get to circularity.

A brief history of circularity

The aspirations of circularity and the circular economy seem deployed in an uncountable number of published documents throughout most business ventures, often using complex language, ardent claims and untenable goals and focusing on recycled content and recycling levels. For simplicity, we use the terms circularity and circular economy interchangeably, noting the first is an encompassing principle and the second is an applied principle leading to a yet-to-be-realized economic system.

Circularity is metaphor for the endless cycling of the physical materials in packages after primary use with small to zero waste, by either reducing the need, reusing or recycling the material, or any combination, while conserving the most energy possible, with the fewest emissions, then bringing the material back to its cardinal intended use in packaging. Complete circularity is venerated as “closing the loop” — a closed system of material containment in a cycle.

The circular economy is a proposed economic system model, touted as regenerative and restorative and designed after stable natural systems, that uses circularity as its principle. The economic model provides wider umbrella strategies, inputs, outputs, feedback loops and methods to reduce, reuse and recycle materials endlessly to zero waste while conserving as much energy as possible. It’s meant to replace the still dominant and growing world linear take-make-waste model of extracting resources, producing virgin packages and disposing discarded package resources after use. It finally portends a perfect utility with the platonic justice of the multiple cycles used, each functioning as intended.

Circles, cycles and circularity have deep metaphorical attractions. Scholars have noted that cycles “are among the oldest ways of grasping human existence,” as a University of Cambridge Alumni Magazine article by Victoria James put it in 2022. To illustrate, in most major religions, the circle of life concept helps navigate emotional and perplexing processes in a closed cycle metaphor; human life and death are presented as part of a comforting cycle ending in either spiritual or physical rebirth, instead of the linear progression of birth to a physical death. For popular culture, a popular myth shared is that everything happens in cycles, which helps build hope or anxiety that the next point in time is predictably better or worse than the last. Sometimes a cycle concept is fully virtuous, where each point or condition along the circumference is a good result that gives rise to another that builds upon the first and so forth. Other times it is the opposite, or vicious.

These metaphorical cycles are what sociologists call umbrella concepts, used to enhance understanding of overarching concepts, feedback loops and actors relative to their impact on each other in a system over time. Psychologists have shown that this cycle thinking is valuable for assessing complex environmental, social, emotional and economic outcomes, and using them helps increase predictability when a predicate condition occurs. Cycles are useful in the sciences as well — for example, in the carbon cycle, the chemical process that was the gateway to higher life forms on Earth. In his classic “From Circular Economy to Circular Society,” M. Friant summarizes some of science’s most used cycle metaphors:

  1. Biogeochemical cycles of Earth.
  2. Ecosystem cycles.
  3. Resource cycles of materials and energy.
  4. Political cycles of power.
  5. Economic cycles of money and wealth.
  6. Knowledge cycles of technology, information, and education.
  7. Social cycles of care.

The concept of circularity for materials is a virtuous cycle. Like all beguiling metaphors, circularity can gloss over nuances and stark realities, including the powerful force of entropy, which is rampant in waste materials management, and external but ignored inputs (Is the carbon cycle possible without the sun?). In the world of materials, tools like life cycle assessments can help us pick apart nuances and apply analytics to the question, but they don’t change the overarching realities and their profound implications.

We could not leave this section without also addressing the word recycle, summarized by Merriam-Webster as to process materials or substances in order to regain material for human use. Unlike circularity, this definition conveys no inherent aspiration, and it does not promise endless cycling; rather, it is just the harvesting of some materials from waste to be used again. One can sense that inevitable material loss is just an accepted fact — we’ll grab what we can and plug it back into productive use. Luckily for us recyclers, though in circularity purgatory, recycling does provide a carbon-positive pathway away from current waste models.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

From the waste hierarchy to circularity for packages

Last century, both the European Union and the U.S. EPA formalized policies around a waste hierarchy, the conceptual predecessor to circularity. This linear hierarchy aspired to minimize energy use and emissions, reduce landfilling and combustion and maximize resource conservation. This model has been productive, allowing waste planners to envision a world where the prioritization takes place and steadily moves materials waste management to preferred methods through policy, programs and investment. It has also been effective for communicating the most virtuous set of choices, and it allows a quick summary of current choices using the common strategies of modern waste management.

However, after over 35 years, the hierarchy has proved inadequate to move actors or address system complexities for inverting the triangle in the U.S. Its limited success, and perhaps its linearity, drove us to consider other conceptualizations and to try to accommodate a dynamic, expanding economy and the compelling urge for profitability and return on investment. The hierarchy in its simplest form seems to unquestionably accept unrestrained material extraction and consumption. The hierarchy then presents no answer to environmental crises in our aquatic and terrestrial systems, including the plastic waste crisis, atmospheric heating and its consequences, extreme losses in biodiversity, issues like PFAS and landfills as methane super-emitters.

Inevitably, this led waste practitioners to search for a more inspirational model that almost by its very nature would mitigate the damage of material consumption — hence, circularity. Famous studies by Will McDonough in 2002 and McKinsey & Company for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2013 were examples of the evolution of a new conceptual approach, introducing a paradigm for stakeholders along the entire value chain to consider. They argued compellingly that the cradle-to-grave model of human consumption is unsustainable. The linear take-make-waste system must give way to an alternative model where resource use is carefully designed, energy is conserved, and materials are endlessly cycled through an economy by reuse or recycling. McKinsey proposed a new economic model that mimics natural models of circularity, which is restorative and regenerative, rather than net-consumptive and hyper-productive. It is summarized neatly in the Palladian symmetry of the famous Butterfly Diagram. McKinsey and the foundation gave us the inspiring view that circularity would bring greater resiliency and security in an economy that will continue to grow because of the cycling of materials, much like natural forest grows and regenerates through natural cycles. It begs the question, though, whether economic expansion that humans value so much is possible under such a seemingly closed system.

Now, like the hierarchy, it’s time to question circularity before it becomes a hollow simplification that leads us to further inaction in the face of environmental crises. How exactly does this idealized view allow us to grapple with the physical nature of packaging and its rapid pace of innovation? How does it address, plan for and recognize the actual physical barriers for package capture from waste generation to MRF, loss in yield after capture from MRF to secondary processor to end market, and the inherent costs for providing enough of the stuff needed to fully cycle a package back to its original intended use?

In short, let’s really dig into packaging circularity’s limitations and the implications therein. Also, practical recycling might just be a long-term answer for some packages short of perfect circularity. Circularity promises big things, but to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet, God’s honest truth is it’s not that simple. If there are limits to packaging circularity, what are our options for addressing them? In Part 2, we will discuss how packaging is transformed in the recycling system, lay out some best practices to mitigate barriers and unstick recovery rates, and explore complementary strategies that could push beyond the boundaries of circularity. Circularity is a hopeful, essential and deeply inspiring concept. Let’s not make it a seat of self-congratulatory laurels to sit on while true growth in material recovery requires urgent action.

Michael Timpane has been a partner and vice president with RRS since 2015 and specializes in the recycling supply chain. He has worked for each of the largest post-consumer recycling companies in their time – Reynolds Aluminum, BFI, and WM – for over a decade each in his half-century career.

Scott Mouw is senior advisor for strategy and research with The Recycling Partnership. He comes from a background of public recycling, including directing the state of North Carolina’s recycling program.

Breaking down barriers

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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Kandi Potter, a resident of Webb City, Missouri, drops off recycling at the city of Joplin’s nearby recycling center in July 2024. Joplin is among several local governments and other organizations receiving education and outreach grants from the U.S. EPA. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

As executive director of the Tahoma Indian Center, a nonprofit serving Indigenous people in Tacoma, Washington, Colette August generally hasn’t had a positive impression of working with the city government. Some of its initiatives have been difficult for the nonprofit to participate in, she said, and city employees generally don’t take the time to visit the center, to speak with the people seeking its help with food or housing or other needs, and to understand the distinctions among the region’s tribes.

She has had a different experience, however, with Preston Peck, a senior sustainability analyst for the city. Peck oversees a community ambassador program that leans on trusted individuals among diverse communities to spread the word about the city’s utilities. Over the last two years or so, he has come to the Tahoma center and forged meaningful connections that have culminated in a $2 million, federally funded partnership, which includes the center and four other community-based organizations, to grow public understanding of recycling. It’s part of a nationwide, multicultural collaboration to reach groups that have long been neglected by messaging efforts or dismissed by the industry.

“They are people who will help break down those barriers, and they truly care about making sure our community is being served, is being heard,” August said of Peck and his colleagues. “One of the reasons for me to say yes is for me to have someone willing to listen to the concerns that we have.”

That’s precisely the purpose of the U.S. EPA Recycling Education and Outreach grants benefiting Tacoma and other locations across the country. The agency late last year announced 25 projects would receive a total of $33 million, which came from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and put particular emphasis on underserved populations disproportionately burdened by environmental problems. Even more money went toward infrastructure and heavy equipment needs.

“These grants reflect the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to tackling environmental justice and the climate crisis,” the agency wrote in a press release at the time, calling the program the largest investment in recycling in 30 years. “These recycling grants will help tackle consumer confusion and outdated recycling infrastructure, the largest barriers to proper recycling.”

Diverse communities, diverse approaches

The multiyear projects, many of which are still in the early stages of hiring managers and putting out preliminary bids, vary widely in dollar amount, geographic area and tactics, according to factsheets provided by the EPA and several participants. Tacoma, for example, will grow the community ambassador program while also using artificial intelligence on collection trucks to flag contamination and send direct feedback in the mail, Peck said.

Projects range in size from a $370,000 plan to build household and neighborhood composting programs in Pittsburgh to $2 million ad campaigns in the Chicago area, Virginia and eastern Oklahoma, among others. Recipients stretch from Maine, where the nonprofit recycling processor Ecomaine is working to reach multifamily residents, to the Big Island, where Recycle Hawai’i plans to train several cohorts of educators who will carry out their own education initiatives.

“This is an area where there is room for significant improvement, there’s a high ceiling that hasn’t been hit,” said Jamie Garvin, director of communications and public affairs for Ecomaine, referring to multifamily recycling. Multifamily properties tend to skew toward low-income, more diverse groups, he added, and the project will create toolkits for property managers and residents to help increase recycling participation from both directions.

“Even well-intentioned residents that might be motivated to do recycling don’t have the same access” compared to single-family neighborhoods, Garvin said. “That’s where we see opportunity to sort of level the field.”

Across the board, the projects aim to build existing initiatives to new heights, such as supporting New York City’s expansion of its curbside composting collection or building new exhibits at EdVenture Children’s Museum in South Carolina — featuring dinosaurs made of recycled materials, of course. The Oregon Community Warehouse, a Portland nonprofit that collects donated furniture and other home goods for refugees, formerly homeless families and others in need, is receiving $1.6 million as it expands to a third “furniture bank” location, said Phil Gerigscott, the group’s communications manager.

“We know there’s more than enough furniture in our community, it’s just a lack of awareness that we exist,” he said.

Past outreach was almost entirely word-of-mouth because of limited resources, so the money will help bring in a few more staff members and contractors, update the center’s website and develop culturally specific ads to reach potential donors in multiple languages, Gerigscott said. After English, Portland’s most common tongues include Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Korean and Arabic.

“We’re breaking down our constituent groups and figuring out who we’re already reaching and who we’re not reaching,” he said. “Even if they have heard of us, what are some potential barriers that are keeping them from donating?”

Gerigscott’s comments highlighted common threads throughout the 25 projects, including meeting residents of all backgrounds where they are, incorporating their particular backgrounds and replacing program administrators’ assumptions or ignorance with real knowledge.

Project leaders spoke of holding in-language gatherings at convenient and familiar locations rather than at City Hall, providing culturally appropriate meals so families can attend, and generally setting the scene for candid dialog. They also often used the term transcreation, in contrast to translation. Rather than converting a flier word-for-word from English to Spanish, transcreation would take a collaborative approach that might adapt the flier into an ad on a popular Spanish-speaking radio station, for example, or create a new flier with phrasing, images and other details that are familiar to the intended audience.

“A lot of times we talk at people,” rather than talking to or with them, said Will DiCostanzo, waste diversion coordinator for the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. The city’s focusing its $1.7 million grant on low-income and minority residents, including the city’s refugee population, as well as University of Nebraska-Lincoln students.

“You could always think of income as a barrier, because you have to pay for recycling here, which is a very obvious barrier that we have. But is it the only one?” DiCostanzo mused. “What do we need to know before we then create education that will motivate people to do the right thing with their waste?” The project aims to answer those questions.

A widespread need

The need for multi-channel, multicultural education reaches far beyond the 25 grant recipients, and it’s only growing clearer as the U.S. becomes more diverse and the country’s recycling activity stagnates.

In surveys across the country, Black and Latino respondents are more likely than their white counterparts to cite lack of access, lack of knowledge, perceived costs and social pressures as barriers that keep them from recycling, for example, according to The Recycling Partnership’s Equitable Outreach Guide. Asian, Pacific Islander and Indigenous respondents felt the same obstacles, though somewhat less intensely.

“If residents haven’t been given what they need to be successful, then it’s unrealistic to expect low contamination and high recycling,” said Michelle Metzler, TRP’s director of community programs. “That’s up to us as industry leaders and program administrators.”

Amelia Kovacs, sustainability programs manager with Walking Mountains Science Center in Eagle County, Colorado, said the nonprofit’s $570,000 grant will help recruit and train recycling advocates among the local Latino community.

While Spanish-speaking residents have often been left out of environmental initiatives in the area and live farther away from services, their obstacles go even deeper than language and proximity, Kovacs said. Many of them immigrated from Latin American countries that don’t widely collect recycling.

“Therefore, many community members do not understand the need to recycle, and more do not know how or where to do it,” she wrote in an email. “This project will amplify current recycling programs ensuring everyone in Eagle County understands where, why, and how to recycle and has equitable access to do so.”

On the other hand, TRP’s surveys have also found widespread interest in the topic, though specific motivations can vary.

“Across demographics and across ethnic groups, recycling is really seen as a common social good,” Metzler said. “It may be less challenging than it’s perceived to get people on board.”

Even when a recycling program’s leaders understand the need for tailored outreach, addressing it takes staff and money and time, she added, which makes grants like the EPA’s essential for the many local governments that lack the needed resources.

That was certainly true for Joplin, Missouri, Assistant City Manager Tony Robyn said. Boosting the city’s recycling programs had been a topic of discussion ever since the city began rebuilding from a devastating EF5 tornado that struck in 2011. Now the city finally has $1.7 million to make it happen. The plan includes a multimedia advertising campaign with a particular focus on partnering with schools and residents of disadvantaged census tracts. Its goal is to increase participation in Joplin’s opt-in curbside program, which services around 1,650 households out of more than 20,000, based on U.S. Census and city data.

“We really saw this grant as an opportunity to build that program out and do some unique and cool partnerships,” Robyn said.

The potential impact was immediately clear one recent morning at Joplin’s recycling drop-off center, where resident George Haubein said he had learned about the curbside option for the very first time.

“I’m gonna sign up,” he said, adding that he stores his recyclables in his garage, and it was his second trip of the day to bring them all in.

Kandi Potter, a resident of nearby Webb City who comes to Joplin’s center because it accepts more materials than a drop-off closer to home, said her whole family takes part in recycling, but many locals might not see recycling as worth their time.

“It depends on the person,” she said.

Joplin resident George Haubein drops off recycling at the city’s collection center in July 2024. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling

At the other end of the spectrum from Joplin is Seattle, which wasn’t among the outreach and education grant recipients but has spent years working to better communicate with a wide variety of residents about its recycling services. Informational materials are available in more than a dozen languages, and residents receive transcreated guidelines once a year in the mail, said Becca Fong, Seattle Public Utilities’ residential compost and recycling program manager.

It wasn’t always this way, Fong said: “We used to do a lot of translating. But we also found that doesn’t necessarily lead to culturally resonant materials.”

That inspired her and her colleagues to start visiting community centers, gathering focus groups and simply sitting down with people going about their days to talk recycling. Now the city has a compendium of recycling terms in multiple languages, images of culturally relevant products and lasting relationships that can be called upon as recycling programs grow and change in the city and across the state.

“We took a big step back and looked at more than just the words,” Fong said. The learning process continues with regular feedback sessions and check-ins with the public as well.

“You can design the most beautiful program … but getting that feedback from customers is what has made us more successful over the years,” she said. “That partnership piece, that is never done.”

While Seattle and many of the EPA grant recipients are particularly populous and diverse places, their efforts to reach multiple audiences — simultaneously teaching and learning from residents, speaking in terms they understand, touching upon the priorities and beliefs they care about — are examples that any community can follow, Metzler with TRP said.

“That two-way street is needed, and it looks different in every community,” she said. “The most important part is starting somewhere, and this is all a journey.”

Recycling’s political paradoxes

Published: July 3, 2024
Updated:

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Real Window Creative/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the June 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

As the Republican-majority Iowa Senate neared a final vote on controversial changes to Iowa’s beverage container deposit program, including one allowing most grocery and convenience stores to stop accepting cans and bottles from residents seeking their 5-cent refunds, several in the chamber made clear that only one political party was behind it.

“You’re making it harder to recycle, Sen. Schultz, Senate Republicans,” Joe Bolkcom, a now retired Democratic senator from Iowa City, said at the time, referring to his colleague, Sen. Jason Schultz, who shepherded the bill through its Senate votes. “Congratulations.”

Schultz responded that the bill would help grocers and everyday Iowans — “This bill does everything they want,” he said — and would lead to more standalone redemption centers by giving them a greater share of each nickel deposit. The bill passed the Senate with 29 Republicans and one Democrat in favor, 15 Democrats against.

Around a month later, the Democrat-controlled California State Legislature approved that state’s landmark extended producer responsibility law. The bill would mandate plastic waste reductions and heightened recyclability for packaging and other goods for years to come, and all Republican members either voted for it or were absent.

“It was an effort that came as a result of a long, long negotiation between environmental and business community representatives,” bill author State Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, told the local Beverly Press afterward. “It’s an example of people coming together from all sides of the spectrum to help solve a major problem.”

Both examples happened in 2022, and both illustrate the paradoxical politics of recycling in capitols across the country, based on interviews, reports and talks by dozens of advocates, legislators, researchers and others in recent weeks. Call it Schrodinger’s recycling: simultaneously partisan yet bipartisan, divisive yet safe, widely popular yet plainly tied to a state’s political leanings.

“You can talk about recycling and you know you’re not going to get a pitchfork in the back,” said Billy Johnson, chief lobbyist at the Recycled Materials Association, which recently changed its name from Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Johnson pointed to notable, recycling-focused odd couples in Congress, such as New Jersey Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone and Illinois Republican Rep. John Shimkus in the House or Republican Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas and Democrat Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who co-chair the Senate Recycling Caucus.

“They’ll disagree on 99% of everything else but recycling,” Johnson said. On that, “it’s difficult sometimes to see the light between them.”

Finding shared cause across party lines helped lead to the inclusion of tens of millions of dollars for recycling education and infrastructure grants in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed with mostly — though not only — Democrat support.

On the other hand, there are conspicuous cracks in this bipartisan image. Boozman and Carper’s proposals to enhance federal recycling and composting data and provide more grants, particularly to underserved areas, keep passing the narrowly Democratic Senate but have yet to find a foothold in the narrowly Republican House, for example.

Looking at the party affiliations of governors and U.S. Senators as a proxy for each state’s political makeup, blue states on average recycle more than twice as many of their cans and bottles as red states, based on the December 2023 50 States of Recycling report from Ball Corporation and Eunomia. Among 10 bottle-bill states, all but Iowa are blue or mixed.

Each of the four states with paper and packaging EPR programs at the start of 2024 were blue or mixed when sorted by the same metric; the Minnesota House’s vote to become the fifth EPR state on May 17 was entirely party-line, with Democrats in favor.

“A lot of the mandatory recycling laws that were passed when I was in high school — so that was 30-plus years ago — a lot of those passed with bipartisan support, but it was a total different universe,” said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of public policy and government affairs at The Recycling Partnership, which has zeroed in on EPR laws as the most impactful way to increase recycling rates. “We just are not in that space anymore.”

De Thomas emphasized that he speaks with legislators of all stripes, no demographic is a monolith, and members of both parties can and do care about recycling as an economic and environmental issue. But today’s polarization and us-versus-them thinking can push bipartisanship aside even when people agree deep down, he said. “It’s not about the policies, it’s about the politics.”

Patterns of difference

Several recent studies and surveys shed light on possible sources for the political gulf in recycling.

Part of the difference is likely everyday politics: Using government to encourage recycling often entails spending and regulation, both of which conservatives tend to resist in some contexts. More right-leaning survey respondents to a 2019 Axios poll were half as willing as their more liberal peers to pay higher taxes to support recycling programs, for example.

Social psychology can also play a role. The feeling that recycling is something that people like you do — or don’t do — could in turn affect how readily you categorize trash as recyclable, a 2020 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggested. An earlier study that analyzed national surveys of recycling behavior found Democrats were more likely to say they recycle most of the time, which the authors attributed to a rise in “lifestyle politics,” or using choices as statements of personal values.

Whatever the reasons, the correlation between politics and recycling behavior and policy seems clear, with higher access to programs and participation in bluer states, broadly speaking, based on data from the Eunomia report and TRP’s 2024 State of Recycling.

In Minnesota, the Senate Republican Caucus said the “hyper-partisan” new EPR law would raise costs for employers and customers.

“Unfortunately, instead of finding balance, Democrats are forcing through controversial environmental restrictions that will crush Minnesotans with more price increases on top of inflation and $10 billion in new taxes passed last year,” Sen. Justin Eichorn, the party’s lead on the Environment, Natural Resources, and Legacy Committee, said in a written statement.

Democratic supporters, meanwhile, hailed the law as an incentive for industry to recycle more.
“Across Minnesota, we are inundated with packaging, from our doorsteps to store shelves,” Rep. Sydney Jordan, Vice Chair of the House’s Environment and Natural Resources Finance and Policy Committee, said in a written statement. “Today’s bill takes steps to ensure the producers of this waste are paying their fair share.”

Political dynamics can play out across states and regions. Mark Dancy, president and founder of WasteZero, a waste-reduction consulting business out of South Carolina, said WasteZero does much of its work further north because of its home region’s low landfill costs, political polarization around the topic and a general lack of interest.

“Our company doesn’t spend a lot of time in the South,” he said during a session at the Waste Expo conference in Las Vegas in May. The circular economy is likely to grow in the coming decades, he added, “but there are parts of the country that are still going to be way behind.”

There are exceptions to the pattern. Rural and conservative Alaska cracks the top 15 in the proportion of households with access to residential recycling service, according to the TRP report, while blue Colorado comes in 45th. Republican Florida and Utah are near the top of the pack with a participation rate of around 70% among the same households, almost double that of purple Vermont and West Virginia.

“We’ll see in Florida, a lot of times the economics drive activity you might not see elsewhere,” such as productive end markets for construction and demolition materials, said Jim Marcinko, southern tier recycling director at WM, at Waste Expo. “We do more C&D in Florida than anywhere else in the country.”

Another paradox complicates the pattern as well, several business leaders said: As a state’s interest in and support for recycling rises, so do the regulatory obstacles, and vice versa. Mick Barry, former president of Mid America Recycling in Iowa and past chairman of the National Recycling Coalition, described it as, “One discourages doing anything, the other needs to be encouraged.”

California, for instance, requires extensive recycling of containers, organics and C&D materials. But building a facility to accomplish those goals takes years of jumping through the hoops of stringent environmental impact rules and other regulations, said Richard Ludt, director of environmental affairs at Interior Removal Specialist Inc., a C&D company in the Los Angeles area.

“In Ohio, I could damn near permit a facility like this over the counter,” he quipped. “The bureaucracy kills us.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Rody Taylor said the C&D business he opened last year, KC Dumpster Company, was Missouri’s first of its kind, and state regulators knew next to nothing about his work. He struggles to compete with cheap landfill fees, he told a Waste Expo audience, but he’s also the only game in town.

KC Dumpster benefits when big developers like Facebook carry “West Coast policies” for C&D diversion into their local projects, Taylor said, and he’s also working on Recycling Certification Institute approval — all of which brings more rules for him to follow. But they’re coming from private entities rather than government agencies, which he prefers.

“There’s just a whole lot to overcome in my case, and the fact that I’ve got my feet on the ground is something I’m pretty proud of,” Taylor said. He added with a laugh, “I’d hate to live in California.”

Recycling regulations aren’t automatically a drag, noted Ludt, a past advisory board member for the Solid Waste Association of North America.

“My business model wouldn’t work in any other state,” he said, and he called the recycling industry “notoriously bad at self-policing.” In fact, more regulation could help ensure that diverted materials go where they’re meant to go and companies don’t inflate their numbers. And he said pushing for sustainability is the right thing to do.

“We absolutely have to protect the environment, because it’s the only one we’ve got,” Ludt said. As long as they don’t price supportive companies out of business, “regulations can be phenomenal.”

The case of Iowa

Recycling’s many political contradictions converge on the Hawkeye State. Its bottle bill came in 1978 at the hands of Republican Gov. Robert D. Ray and then-State Rep. Terry Branstad, both icons of the state’s Republican Party, chiefly as a litter-control tool, said Barry, formerly of Mid America.

“The bottle bill created an ethic in every Iowan from, I’m almost 74 now, to my little grandkids that I babysit,” he said. Barry called the bill a cornerstone of the state’s recycling system and the primary reason that Iowa’s bottle and can recycling rate is four times as high as neighboring Nebraska’s, by Ball Corporation’s count.

The program carried on, broadly popular and unchanged, until proposals to repeal it or alter it started cropping up over the past decade or so, said R.G. Schwarm, executive director of a nonprofit association of recycling businesses called Cleaner Iowa. The group was created to educate legislators about the bottle bill’s benefits as a result.

“We appreciate that the bottle bill is a free market system that hasn’t required a penny of government money,” Schwarm said. “After 40 years, some changes were needed, and we wanted to make sure that when these changes were implemented, the consumer was also included.”

Proposed changes included expanding the bottle bill to include more containers, such as water bottles, or directing unredeemed deposits into a state fund rather than letting the producers keep them. What carried the day in 2022 was a package of proposals that in part increased redemption centers’ handling fee, or share of the nickel deposit, from 1 cent to 3 cents, which was lauded across the board as necessary to support existing centers and encourage new ones. Kevin Kinney, the former state senator who was the only Democrat voting for the changes, said in an interview that he voted yes to support a struggling center, and its jobs, in his district.

The bill also exempted hundreds of grocery and convenience stores from having to take back cans and bottles, citing sanitation and food safety concerns. Though Schwarm said the provision had support in both parties, it became the center of a partisan dispute. In the state Senate, Democrats argued Iowans should be able to redeem containers where they bought them and participating would become more difficult, while Republicans argued the higher handling fee, plus a provision allowing mobile redemption centers, would make up the difference in redemption locations.

Two years on, a recent survey by Cleaner Iowa found more than 2,000 stores had stopped accepting containers, including several that weren’t exempt from participating even under the 2022 changes, while redemption centers increased to about 100.

Democrat State Sen. Bill Dotzler, who in 2022 called the changes “the first step of just totally eliminating the bottle bill,” said his views hadn’t changed since.

“It’s going to be a slow death in my view,” he said in May, pointing to the 29 counties Cleaner Iowa found have no redemption centers. “This is kind of a pseudo bottle bill. In rural Iowa, it’s going to be pretty much nonexistent.”

Republican State Rep. Brian Lohse, who has popped up in local media saying the bottle bill might need to be repealed because of its struggles, said in an interview that repeal would be a last resort. He still supports the store exemptions — “These things should not be in those environments” — but conceded shortcomings in 2022’s legislation.

“It’s just not working like we had hoped, or at least like I hoped,” he said, adding the state needs to enforce the new rules.

The Legislature plans to review the changes starting in 2025, and potential tweaks are already up for discussion. Schwarm still argues that places that sell bottles and cans should take them back, and some Republicans introduced bills this year undoing some of the exemptions. Dotzler suggested adding water bottles as redeemable containers, and Lohse said he’s interested in steering unredeemed deposits toward curbside recycling for all households.

Above all, support for the program is widespread, with more than 80% of Iowans in favor, according to Cleaner Iowa polls, and the state boasts one of the highest recycling rates in the country. Dotzler, Kinney, Lohse and another legislative Republican who’s worked on the issue, State Sen. Ken Rozenboom, all said they took part in the redemption program.

“This really is a conversation that I think everyone can have because they’re materials that we all interact with,” said Jane Wilch, recycling coordinator for Iowa City and president of the Iowa Recycling Association. “We really approach them as relatable topics to everyone, no matter the party, no matter where anyone stands politically.”

The power of the nickel deposit gets some of the credit, Barry added.

“For the general public, the bottle bill puts a value on a raw material. That’s education,” he said. “We’re not educating anyone anymore, we’ve got nothing but turmoil in the bill, but people want it.”

Common ground

Researchers at Idaho State University a decade ago found that the framing of the recycling issue affected how people perceived it, particularly if they were more conservative.

The researchers compared responses to two main ways of describing why recycling matters: a duty-based framing that emphasized responsibility, efficiency and dwindling space in landfills, for example, and a civic engagement-based framing that emphasized natural resource and energy savings, impact on the climate and blaming greedy corporations.

Overall, more liberal respondents tended to agree with the value of recycling regardless of the framing, the study found. More conservative respondents typically voiced agreement with the duty-based explanation.

In other words, in the buffet of reasons to want to recycle, liberal people tend to find a wider variety of the dishes appetizing — but everyone can find something to eat.

“That’s one reason I have worked in recycling for nearly 20 years — there is someone for everyone to like,” said Kate Bailey, chief policy officer at the Association of Plastic Recyclers, which owns the publisher of this magazine and supports EPR, mandated recycled content and similar policies. Parties disagree on the proper role of government in the details, Bailey added, but “good policy is about compromise — no one gets everything they want, but everyone is heard and can help shape a workable solution.”

Real-life examples of the Idaho study’s findings have popped up in recent months, as concerns over full or hazardous landfills have prompted calls for better recycling plans both on conservative Long Island and in liberal L.A. County.

In northwest Arkansas, a medium-sized but booming region that’s home to Walmart and other corporate headquarters, neighbors of the region’s primary landfill have been fighting the WM-owned facility’s attempts to expand as its remaining capacity dwindles.

The area’s Republican representatives in the state House, Robin Lundstrum and Steve Unger, have called for air and groundwater testing and the landfill’s potential closure, and they’ve voiced support for gasification, a form of processing MSW en masse into fuel and other usable materials. Unger said the issue stuck with him as he began driving past the landfill to visit a relative and was struck by its finite capacity.

“I think we should all be environmentalists,” he said. “I am a conservative, but I believe in clean water, I believe in clean air.”

Similarly, advocates from Florida to Oregon said the economics of recycling – jobs created, materials put to work, businesses opened – is a skeleton key to unlocking support from across the ideological spectrum.

“That’s the manna from heaven that all politicians want to see,” said de Thomas with TRP, who added that successful policy requires engaging with the full variety of communities, businesses and other stakeholders affected. “Not one stakeholder can plant the seed and till the soil themselves.”

A bipartisan group in Congress has introduced a bill to remove the excise tax on large trucks, which would benefit many industries, as Jim Riley, the National Waste & Recycling Association interim president and CEO, noted during Waste Expo. More narrowly, a national deposit program is getting some traction, too.

“We are on the cusp of getting a national recycling refund introduced to Congress in a bipartisan way,” said Heidi Sanborn, founding director of the National Stewardship Action Council, echoing a similar sentiment from Barry. “I’m very, very hopeful because there’s so much industry hunger for this material.”

In the end, the heart of recycling’s bipartisan appeal seems clear when people of different backgrounds and politics are asked not which policy they favor or which party they belong to but instead simply why they recycle.

“One thing that really resonates with me personally is I kind of hate the idea of using something for a really short finite time and it existing forever in the world,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste and a strong proponent of the state’s industry regulation. Lundstrum, one of the Arkansas Republicans, put it this way: “I hate throwing away something that I know can be reused.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify Richard Ludt’s  previous role with the Solid Waste Association of North America.

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First-Person Perspective: Challenging the status quo on food-grade polypropylene

Published: July 3, 2024
Updated:

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Afanasiev Andrii/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the June 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

In the last half of 2023 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave their “Letter of No Objection” to 14 companies in North America, Asia and Europe to use their recycled resin products for food-contact packaging. Yet to date there is no information or publicity on applications of recycled food-grade polypropylene resin being used in food-contact packaging.

One of the key reasons for this is that PP is at the beginning of its recyclability journey. If we consider the most widely recycled polymers to date, PET and HDPE, their recycling journey was not an immediate overnight success, either. I recall when we were first producing food-grade RPET in the U.K., there was considerable reluctance to using it in food-contact packaging, and it required extensive trialing before it was adopted for standard production. Now this is an everyday occurrence.

PP is currently going through the exact same phase.

PP’s slow recycling journey

Yet PP accounts for more than 20% of global plastics production, with food packaging being one of its primary products. In fact, some 75% of PP rigid packaging in the EU is food-contact, equivalent to around 10% of total PP demand.

One of the key reasons recycled food-grade PP resin is not yet being used in food packaging, even with an LNO, has to do with a reticence towards this new resin’s ensured safety. The hesitation comes from a lack of experience that this food-grade recycled material is safe to use in consumer food-contact packaging.

The challenge with RPP is that up until now it has not been possible to accurately differentiate between PP packaging that once contained non-food products from those that contained food. As a consequence, current food-grade recycled PP has been limited to closed-loop recycling, hand-sorting or advanced recycling technology processes based on mass balance, which is not yet recognized as recycling in the European Union.

Characterizing residual contamination levels in rPP

Progress is rapidly catching up however, thanks to NextLooPP’s ongoing science-driven exploration to close the loop on post-consumer food-grade PP.

Achieving this has meant addressing each and every roadblock along the way and deep-diving into the specific sorting and decontamination requirements for the recycling processes for PP.

This led to NextLooPP’s science-based investigation to determine the residual contamination levels of post-consumer PP packaging, which up until now have never been characterized.

The lack of data showing the misuse/mis-selection rate within PP feedstocks had meant there was no reliable way of defining the residual levels that could potentially migrate into food as well as understanding which molecules to target via decontamination processes.

NextLooPP’s study aimed to identify substances that might cause samples of RPP to be outliers from the expected input stream that could represent challenges to the final safety of the recycled plastics. The key issue was to check whether the substances observed could potentially be genotoxic.

This is a critical criterion for food safety evaluations, given that the substances could be derived from the mis-selection of an item of non-food PP packaging, which is not necessarily a case of misuse.

All in the shape of the pack

Being olefinic, the packaging format of consumer PP packaging reduces the chances of it being in a consumer-misuse scenario. A large proportion of PET packaging is relatively durable with a tight closure, making it a container of choice when used for the storage of hazardous materials. Likewise, HDPE packaging is also in bottle form with a closure, meaning it, too, may be used in such a scenario. PP food containers, on the other hand, are less likely to come in bottle form and much more likely to be pots, tubs, or trays with limited closure capability, making it a less likely candidate for consumer misuse.

Characterizing the residues in post-consumer packaging that have been sorted into mono-polymer fractions was done by analyzing and testing multiple batches of food and non-food samples to see what molecules are present and if there are any areas of concern.

To achieve this our team of scientists worked on 20-ton batches of PP bales sourced from a U.K.-based materials recovery facility. Using automatic optical sorters to separate color fractions of natural, white and colored articles, each color fraction was hand-sorted into articles from food applications and articles from non-food applications.

The analytical study involved 700 tests, representing approximately 17,500 different PP packs based on 25 significantly sized flakes per test. This was estimated to be a cross-sectional representation of 7% of the packs from the combination of batches of 260,000 packs.

Following this contamination study, NextLooPP characterized the contamination levels in PP and concluded that they are in the order of 10 times less than what we expect in HDPE milk bottles and 100 times less than expected in PET. This is not surprising given the applications that select PP as the packaging material.

Food-grade rPP resin confidence

Understanding the sorting and decontamination requirements needed to enhance the recycling processes further validates Nextek’s global multi-participant project, NextLooPP, that launches imminently in the Americas.

This data is essential to allow food-grade PP packaging to be recycled into high-value recyclates that can safely be used in new food-contact packaging, and we are confident the performance standards we have now developed will enable us to help organizations reach a high level of technical performance as well as commercial and legal confidence in the food-grade RPP they can include in food-contact packaging.

By deploying NextLooPP’s expertise and technical backup, NextLooPP aims to license the NextLooPP technology to ensure that the resin standards can be fast-tracked into U.S.-produced RPP food-grade packaging.

Finding validated local solutions for the end of life of post-consumer food-grade PP packaging has been the driving force behind NextLooPP’s 53 participants, who are actively producing and trialing a range of unique grades of high-quality food-grade recycled PP resins produced using Nextek’s patented PPristine decontamination technology.

Proof in the commercialized trials

Eighteen of NextLooPP’s brand and converter participants have now finalized 55 commercialization trials using five PPristine resin grades: natural food-grade IM, natural food-grade, white food-grade, mixed-color food-grade and non-food grade mixed-color INRT, and the results have been outstanding. As an example, trials using 30% of NextLooPP’s PPristine resins in both extrusion and thermoforming trays achieved product quality that is comparable with the virgin products with no changes in processing conditions.

Transforming sorting

While the multi-participant project now fine-tunes the resin quality standards that are poised to become standard for food-grade recycled PP, recent trials conducted by NextLooPP together with Tomra have confirmed a major breakthrough in the automatic sorting of food-grade PP packaging.

These sorting trials held in February, which combined Tomra’s near-infrared, visual spectrometry with the company’s latest deep-learning technology GAINnext, achieved food-grade purity levels exceeding 95% in packaging applications.

This exciting development is an invaluable boost to the NextLooPP project, as GAINnext has the potential to be rolled out to all PP packaging sorting facilities and will help produce valuable food-grade PP PCR streams.

By providing a sorted food-grade PP PCR stream, GAINnext will enable the NextLooPP decontamination process to be carried out in many more recycling operations globally.

Close to the finish line

After close to four years of intense collaboration, the NextLooPP participants are now breaking down the final barriers to producing food-grade recycled PP from post-consumer packaging into new circular economy products, and the NextLooPP team is looking forward to launching the NextLooPP Americas project to achieve similar outstanding results.

Boosting the production of recycled food-grade PP resin is a major step towards stimulating growth in the sector and creating a market where sustainable solutions will become competitive with and a replacement for virgin polymers.

Edward Kosior has worked in the plastics recycling sector for 48 years, including 22 years as an academic and 26 years working in recycling and sustainable solutions. He’s the founder of the consulting organization Nextek Ltd.; of NextLooPP, a global project working to close the loop on post-consumer polypropylene; and of COtooCLEAN, which uses a unique super-critical CO2 technology to decontaminate, de-ink and delaminate soft plastic films back to food-grade compliance.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

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Zero waste takes off

Published: June 21, 2024
Updated:

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Petrmalinak/Shutterstock

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on the history of the zero waste movement and its impact; see part 1 here.

Our three legacy movements — recycling, anti-incineration and zero waste — are working expeditiously to reach 90% diversion with no incineration, organics out of landfills and no toxics in our packages or products. Communities, businesses and local governments today are equipped with strategic policies and programs that were not available when the three legacy movements emerged prior to 2000.

While the movement toward zero waste gains strength and momentum, so do the economic and environmental challenges that threaten us. Consider, for example, between 2012 and 2022, Maryland energy providers spent about $100 million subsidizing trash incinerators through that state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard. A bill in the state legislature eliminates these payments and saves the state another $200 million between 2023 and 2030, according to testimony by Clean Water Action before the Maryland State Legislature in March.

With regard to our environment and nature itself, we have to eliminate the particulate emissions laden with microplastics, which represent our human fingerprints on ecological calamities. Plastic pollution, in particular, has transformed from an environmental crisis to a crisis of “critical human health,” as the recent documentary “Plastic People” makes clear. And then there are PFAS, chemicals with a virtually indestructible bond between chlorine and carbon molecules that, along with plastic, invade all of nature, including our bodies. Yet the plastics industry is telling our school children that there is nothing to worry about, as The Washington Post reported in February.

New strategies and tactics to rein in waste

The U.S. EPA has identified 100 local policies and programs that boost recycling. One of the most impactful is unit pricing or garbage metering, often called pay as you throw. Households are charged only for the waste they set out on the curb but not for recycling or composting. In practice, recycling can increase by 40% in one year. Cities adopting PAYT have reduced per capita waste generation from the US average of 4 pounds per day to less than 1 pound per day, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Bans and rewash initiatives focused on plastic products are having a major impact on economic, environmental and social problems as well. Scores of new companies are investing in wash systems that rely on reusable tableware in numerous jurisdictions banning single use plastic products. Durable plastic and stainless steel utensils are rewashed on site or picked up, cleaned and returned to the restaurant for use. Restaurant chains, sports and entertainment venues, government cafeterias and schools are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by switching to this new phenomenon, driven by local policy initiatives.

Venues that do not have wash facilities can obtain grants for this infrastructure from both federal programs and companies such as ReDish, RCup, Plastic Free Restaurants (and Schools), rWorld, Bold Reuse, We ReUse, and ReThink Disposables.

“We are starting to see a whole shift toward changing consumer behavior as scores of new reuse service companies are emerging,” said Chrise De Tournay, a zero waste adviser to government agencies and companies who tracks developments in this sector. “Local governments can lead the way to close the loop from one way plastic with an investment in rewash systems instead of single-use products.”

Right-to-repair laws requiring computer, automobile and farm equipment manufacturers to provide repair manuals and tools to customers and small repair businesses have been passed in 25 states.

Building deconstruction is spreading rapidly as new policies require deconstruction when buildings built before 1970 are taken down. In Baltimore, Second Chance, a nonprofit deconstruction enterprise, has 250 workers, up from six workers when they started in 2003. Around 90% of these workers are drawn from hard-to-employ people in the city and now have jobs with wages and benefits to raise a family and own a home. If the Baltimore City Council passes a bill requiring mandatory deconstruction, Second Chance CEO Mark Forster estimates that he will have to train and hire another 250 workers.

Another deconstruction company in Baltimore, Humanim, reported a zero recidivism rate for workers who were ex-offenders. The national rate for recidivism is 75%. Building deconstruction in Baltimore as elsewhere recycles people as well as building materials.

Deconstruction spread rapidly from its humble beginnings in the late 1990s as pilot projects took down World War II military barracks built with prized redwood lumber. Today the Reuse People, a deconstruction company based in San Diego, has over a dozen affiliates across the U.S. The Building Materials Reuse Association represents 32 robust for-profit, nonprofit and government programs in the U.S. and Canada.

“Deconstruction and reuse and construction and demolition recycling are on the minds of California cities and joint powers authorities triggered by new climate action plans or updates, as well as new construction and demolition waste ordinances required to meet the state’s Cal Green Code,” said Nicole Tai, owner of GreenLynx deconstruction company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Local ordinances in cities in California, Colorado and elsewhere require a bond from companies and require them to recycle 50% or more of all construction and demolition debris to have their bond money returned. At the national level, the EPA identifies deconstruction and reuse as examples of measures to include in state climate action plans funded under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Repair and resale of consumer products through retail thrift – appliances, textiles, furniture, mattresses and books – impact environmental, economic and social issues in the communities they serve. Iconic enterprises in this field include:

  • The Reuse Corridor serves the Central Appalachian regions of Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.
  • Habitat for Humanity operates 50 ReStores, which help stabilize low-income families and communities.
  • Independent enterprises that fulfill the same mission include:
    • Urban Ore, in Berkeley, California.
    • Rebuilding Center in Portland, Oregon.
    • Construction Junction in Pittsburgh.
    • Community Forklift in Washington, D.C.
    • The Repurpose Center in Gainesville, Florida.
    • Saint Vincent de Paul of Lane County operates mattress, textile, appliance, and furniture enterprises in Eugene, Oregon. It created the Cascade Alliance, which replicated 10 new community-based enterprises across the US. Each enterprise pays hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales taxes as their workers pay wage taxes to local and state governments.

Notable enterprises like RecycleForce in Indianapolis, which repurposes discarded products from hotels, airlines and sports stadiums, and HomeBoy Enterprises in Los Angeles, which works in e-scrap, focus on people. They provide low-skilled workers a pathway away from chronic unemployment and gangs toward homeownership, stable family and community life.

LiquiDonate is a new startup that diverts returned consumer goods and excess inventory from landfills to schools and nonprofit organizations in support of local economic circularity in Canada and the U.S. Upstream just released its business reuse and circular economy start-up directories at upstreamsolutions.org.

Composting is the proverbial magic bullet for zero-waste campaigns. We are seeing Americans take to composting as we did to recycling in the 1970s. About 9% of the waste stream is now being composted, according to this year’s Composting State of Practice report by the Environmental Research & Education Foundation, United States Composting Council and Desert Research Institute, and the expectation is that this will grow rapidly.

Composting combined with food waste reduction programs can readily double the country’s recycling rate within just a few years. In addition to managing food scraps through composting – and aerobic and anaerobic digestion – food waste reduction programs are proliferating and proving highly cost effective.

The public has demanded that comprehensive, distributive composting be implemented in all parts of the U.S. When a private composting company in Wilmington, Delaware, that was serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area 10 years ago failed, citizens pushed for public action. Compost programs were launched in Prince George’s, Montgomery and Howard counties and in D.C. Some are robust, some are maturing, but citizen action moved the region forward.

Nine states – California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington – now have laws mandating that organics be diverted from landfill or incineration. A bill proposed in Maryland would impose a surcharge of $2 per ton on all waste landfilled or incinerated in the state. The dollars raised will be allocated in favor of small-scale composting.

In Cleveland, Rust Belt Riders demonstrates how community-based enterprises can start with collecting food discards from homes and bike trailers and grow to provide city-wide service with five trucks and 35 workers. Rust Belt Riders will host a national gathering of community-based compost enterprises and programs in October.

In New York, all large generators of organic discards must send materials to a compost facility if it is within 25 miles of the point of generation. Schools have been exempted from the regulations. Anna Giordano of We Future Cycle, Inc. is working to end that exclusion.

“Schools are large generators and there should be systemic composting and recycling programs in place, not just for financial reasons but chiefly for the educational and social benefits. Teaching students early that very small changes in daily life can make a huge difference is creating generational change,” she said.

“It was done with seatbelts, and it can surely be done with waste management and environmental awareness. And of course students will carry the recycling and composting knowledge to the entire family as curb collection programs are implemented in their towns.”

Organic materials make up 35% to 40% of the waste stream. There are year-round stable markets for finished compost and compost products in every part of the country. Quality material is valued at from $75 to $100 per ton, or three cubic yards. When applied to agriculture, compost restores eroding topsoil, conserves water and improves soil health. Economies of scale can be reached in your kitchen (vermicomposting), backyard, community and city. Composting results in a ripple effect for jobs in processing, landscaping, and nurseries and home gardening stores. Keeping organics out of landfills reduces leachate and methane gas emissions.

Anaerobic digestion facilities, which digest organic material to recover methane, also have an array of economies of scale from small units to manage manures on farms to industrial facilities. A 5,000-ton-per-year facility can digest scraps from school cafeterias, restaurant chains and entertainment venues.

There is a danger from large-scale anaerobic digestion plants. The plant coming online in Jessup, Maryland, is scaled at 120,000 tons per year. To assure that it can get sufficient materials to make a profit, the company is lobbying against programs that support smaller compost operations and farmer composting networks.

REUSE AS EMPLOYMENT AND CLIMATE POLICY

Minnesota’s reuse economy:

  • Creates 45,000 jobs.
  • Is valued at over $5 billion.
  • Avoids carbon emissions equivalent to 100,000 gas powered vehicles.
  • Could add 1,700 more jobs in electronic scrap reuse.

Source: Reuse Minnesota

FEDERAL GRANT PROGRAMS FOR ZERO WASTE:

U.S. EPA:

  • Climate Pollution Reduction Grants.
  • Solid Waste Infrastructure Grants.
  • Recycling Education and Outreach.
  • Brownfields.
  • Pollution Prevention.
  • Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers.
  • Community Change.

U.S. Department of Agriculture:

  • Composting and Food Waste Reduction.
  • Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production.

U.S. Department of Energy:

  • Recycle-X Competition.
  • Strategy for Plastics Innovation.
  • Make It Prize.
  • Battery Manufacturing and Recycling.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

  • Marine Debris Community Action Coalition.

Critical developments at the EPA

The incineration industry is aggressively fighting to protect its turf. Ongoing lobbying efforts are under way to persuade EPA to declare pyrolysis or gasification of garbage a non-incineration technology.

The public, especially environmentalists who are focused on plastic reduction, fear that incineration of plastic waste will only bring more virgin plastic pollution. Plastic particles already permeate every crack and crevice of the natural world, including our bodies. Microplastics are found in human brains and babies’ umbilical cords with unknown consequences.

Thanks to the work of the Energy Justice Network and its network of over 30 grassroots groups, the EPA has been challenged to justify its decades long claim that garbage incineration is a better waste management technique than landfilling. EJN and its network is further pressing EPA to recalculate its Waste Reduction Model, or WARM, which also has been a prop for determining that incineration is better than landfilling.

The model “gets it backwards when constantly showing results that burning trash (and landfilling ash) is better for the climate than directly landfilling trash. The opposite is true,” Energy Justice Network CEO Mike Ewall said. “Incinerators immediately shoot all of the carbon in trash into the atmosphere while much of the carbon in waste ends up stored in landfills, especially from plastics that don’t biodegrade.”

A new law in Oregon may also impact the fate of garbage incineration nationally. The justice network, working with anti-incineration forces, in Oregon succeeded in passing a requirement in 2023 that incinerators operating in the state must have continuous monitoring of emissions and report this information to the public.

By next year the landscape for incineration could change fundamentally. In late February, for example, the U.S. EPA updated the
National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter, tightening the standard for soot pollution from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter. The EPA estimates that the new rule will save 4,200 lives, prevent 5,400 new cases of asthma and 10,000 emergency room visits and avoid 270,000 lost workdays each year.

The role of EPR

It remains to be seen how recently passed extended producer responsibility laws will impact the recycling and incineration industry. Industry giants have overseen 20 years of no growth in the national recycling rate. What will the producer responsibility organizations created by EPR laws to oversee recycling and composting change? Will incineration – in cement kilns, industrial boilers and/or in pyrolysis plants – become part of a greenwashed version of zero waste? Already burning options are included in many bad EPR proposals around the U.S., such as California’s SB 54, which may include chemical recycling. An EPR bill in New York prepared by Beyond Plastics environmental group specifically excludes chemical recycling.

It all depends on whether grassroots strategies and values are written into the governing rules and regulations. The fear at the grassroots level is that corporate giants in the packaging and plastic industry can easily gain control of an EPR bureaucracy, or producer responsibility organization, and promote incineration as an acceptable management practice. This has happened in British Columbia. This would pervert the nature of EPR from a policy of polluter pays to a policy of polluter controls.

Some states are considering using consultants to manage the PRO. This also is worrisome for grassroots zero waste advocates. Why contract out for essential long-term services that require skilled public servants to manage? Building capacity and institutional memory within the public sector is essential.

Elizabeth Balkan, Director of ReLoop North America, said EPR could present a barrier to the expansion of reuse regimens.

“EPR could be used as a tool for accelerating or decelerating source reduction,” she said. “Producers will be focused on securing the cheapest possible programs, and because reuse solutions are cost-effective long-term but require significant upfront capital, they will not voluntarily make the investments.”

Balkan continued: “Developing reuse targets and incentives, as well as funding requirements, is critical to achieve system performance and source reduction. Without this, we could be locking ourselves into several more decades of a carbon-intensive toxic and polluting single use packaging economy.”

Any city or county seeking financial support for capital investment in zero-waste infrastructure and enterprises can apply to numerous federal grant programs.

Will this be enough to stop the plastic/pyrolysis onslaught?

Most recently, PFAS chemicals have drawn attention from scientists and activists in addition to well-known pollutants emanating from municipal waste incinerators. Incineration of PFAS material produces smaller versions of the chemical.

PFAS were developed in the ’40s, and by the ’70s began appearing in consumer products and eventually in nature and humans. They are manufactured mostly in the U.S. and Europe by two companies, 3M and DuPont, but are highly mobile via rain, snow and soil. The companies were “deeply aware” of the dangers, explained David Bond of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College during a presentation to the Westchester Alliance for Sustainable Solutions in March. Most recently, the EPA designated two PFAS compounds as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund program.

Living downstream from plastic manufacturing or military bases is dangerous, Bond has said, as PFAS contribute to an array of health problems including cancer, obesity and hypertension. Plastic manufacturing plants have proliferated in recent years in the US: 55 since 2012, with companies proposing to build 33 plants, though that number could rise, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.

Extremely low levels of exposure to PFAS can trigger these serious ailments and more. Yet the petrochemical industry is fighting back against the common-sense efforts to stop plastics from impacting the environment. The proliferation of these plants will allow the industry to produce more and more plastic. Industry is heavily lobbying to exempt this technology from all air pollution rules; incinerators are not incinerators, they claim, but rather are energy manufacturing plants. In the past few years these lobbying efforts at the state level have convinced 25 states to adopt this rebranding and make the plants eligible for public financing.

Since federal laws preempt state laws, the industry is focusing its forces on the EPA to reclassify pyrolysis. Such false rebranding would open the door to more and more plastic pollution. In addition, the industry is targeting special new tax credits for electricity generated by pyrolysis plants.

The environmental movement in the 1960s was a candle in the dark for Americans. Today, the warnings from plastic production and global warming are a burning bush. Plastic particles have entered our lungs, our brains and our babies. Global warming is leading us headlong into ecological collapse. Now is the time for grassroots activists to aggressively approach their officials to take advantage of available funds, technology and businesses to eliminate incineration and implement zero waste. We are at the take-off stage for achieving zero waste. It is within reach.

As before, we must organize at the local level to protect the gains we have already made and overcome these new challenges. Solid waste management decisions are made at the local level, where activists can secure zero waste policies and programs, and which ripple upwards into state and federal actions. We need to vote for zero waste champions to maintain and accelerate this process.

Neil Seldman is cofounder of Zero Waste USA, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Zero Waste International Alliance and Save the Albatross Coalition. He directs the Recycling Cornucopia Program at Zero Waste USA, which provides pro bono assistance to community and environmental organizations as well as small businesses.

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Plastics Recycling Conference 2024: Charting a course in plastic recycling

Published: June 21, 2024
Updated:

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Big Wave Productions/Resource Recycling

In the showdown between recycled and virgin plastic resins, recycling can’t prevail without more supportive public policy, greater buy-in from the public and other outside reinforcements, several plastics recycling leaders agreed in March.

Two numbers make the scale of the imbalance clear. The recycling sector collects roughly 5 billion pounds of bottles, films and other plastics for recycling each year in the U.S., according to the research and consulting firm Stina Inc. U.S. plastic producers, meanwhile, made more than 8 billion pounds of new resin just in the month of February, as tallied by the American Chemistry Council, a national association of chemical manufacturers.

Far from the early days of plastic recycling, when reclaimed resin was seen as a more cost-effective and somewhat embarrassing alternative, recycled plastic is now sought after in many contexts but outcheapened and outmatched by a worldwide glut of the new stuff.

“If we don’t deal with the price differential, at the end of the day – I believe this – nothing we do matters,” Stephen Alexander, president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, told an audience during Resource Recycling’s Plastics Recycling Conference in the Dallas area earlier this year. APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., which publishes this magazine.

“Some call it headwinds we face, I call it the attacks that we face across the board,” he added. “A lot of us are here trying to solve a problem that someone else creates.”

That was one of many takeaways speakers shared at the annual conference, where around 2,500 attendees gathered in Grapevine, Texas, for 20 sessions that delved into product design, artificial intelligence, chemical recycling techniques and other important trends.

The lay of the land

In a series of panel discussions, Alexander and other experts painted a somber picture of an industry in some ways stuck in a rut, though they also identified several levers that could help pry it out. George Smilow, chief operating officer at New York-based PQ Recycling, recalled starting his career back in the 1970s.

“Back then I believe there were about 50 to 60 PET reclaimers in North America, and the return rate was 30%,” he said. “Today there are about half, and the return rate is about 27%.”

New plastic production, on the other hand, has gone gangbusters to the point of overkill, said Joel Morales, vice president of polyolefins Americas for Chemical Market Analytics.

China is a big driver, he said. Many new plants there are tied to fossil fuel refineries, insulating them from low prices amid an oversupply, and projects are also trying to get ahead of anticipated regulation and building difficulties. But it’s a global pattern.

“From a virgin resin supplier perspective, we’ve only added more capacity since last year, and we’ve removed demand in the virgin forecast,” Morales said. “It’s almost like people do exactly the opposite of what we suggest they do.”

On the recycling side, companies and government programs face a disjunction between supply and demand for recycled plastics, with simultaneously too much and too little material on hand. With curbside recycling flat for years, supply can fall short of sustainability goals set by major brands, for example.

Courtesy of Stina Inc.

“The engineering and technology that we use today is amazing compared to when we first started – we can do just about anything. The only thing we can’t engineer is getting more bottles,” Smilow said. “It’s not something that you can just go out and buy. It exists only if people return the bottles and they’re in some sort of a system where we can get those bottles and make something of them, return them to the system.”

Scott Saunders, general manager for KW Plastics in Alabama, said recycling must do a better job of reaching mid-sized, mid-U.S. cities to get more inflow.

“We can build all the lines we want to build, so can Jon,” Saunders said, referring to his co-panelist, Jon Vander Ark, president and CEO of Republic Services – both companies have invested heavily in expanding their recycled plastic processing capacity in the past few years. “If we don’t have the material to put on those lines, it’s just equipment.”

Demand can appear strong at least for certain resins and contexts. After Republic began building facilities to process post-consumer plastic, “we had 50 customers come up to us and say ‘we’ll buy every molecule that comes out the back door of all five of your facilities,’” Vander Ark said.

Yet demand can falter or lag when sustainability goals fall by the wayside in the face of low virgin costs, concerns over food safety or other factors.
Some post-consumer films have received no-objection letters from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for their use in food-grade pouches, but “we’re still seeing some resistance in that actually being commercialized,” said Cherish Changala, vice president of sustainability and public affairs at the Arkansas-based reclaimer Revolution.

“In many cases, you can say they’re able to recycle material, but it’s that demand that’s not there,” she said. “What’s it going to take to get us over that hurdle?”

With all of this in mind, the question posed by a session title – can PCR still compete? – has a clear answer, said panelist David Nix, president of Pennsylvania-based Green Group Consulting.

“No, it can’t compete,” he said, pointing to the myriad collection, shipping, processing and cleaning costs tied around recycling’s neck. “That’s a no-win situation. It’s just not going to work. The things that will make that work are legislation.”

‘Take the devil out of plastics’

Several panelists joined the call for recycling-friendly policy. Nix and Alexander favored state laws requiring that new packages include minimum proportions of recycled content, as some states have done, as a way to essentially force demand into being.

Vander Ark said brands’ verbal commitments don’t always reach into the companies’ cost-focused procurement offices without that legal poke. “That world is starting to rotate because of regulation, and we’re seeing that in California, New Jersey and other states. And that’s the reason why we’re making this investment.”

Boosting recycling tax credits to match other industries, making recycling programs more consistent in the materials they accept and requiring manufacturers to buy their recycled resin domestically would all help as well, Alexander said. Extended producer responsibility seems promising, but he’s waiting to see results.

“The plastics recycling industry is being left behind, because we’re tasked to do it all by ourselves,” he said.

Nina Bellucci Butler, CEO at Stina Inc. and a moderator of two sessions, pressed panelists to keep a deeper need in mind: making recycling worthwhile, in all senses of the word. Recycling does a lot of good, including for the environment and public health, but this isn’t always obvious or tangible for the general public.

“I can either throw it away, where it’s easy, or I can recycle. It’s a little extra effort. There’s no economic benefit for them to do that. So what is the other motivation that they have?” she said. “Is there something that we haven’t thought of yet that really provides the value on PCR, that represents all those things that society actually needs? It is a public service, and we’re not seeing that translated to the reclaimers.”

Brian King, executive vice president of marking at Advanced Drainage Systems out of Ohio, pointed to local policy changes like higher tipping fees for waste than for recycling. More broadly, he said the recycling industry needs to tell its story in a better and more unified way, echoing comments from Alexander and others.

“It is showing what happens to the product, showing what a recycled material does versus a virgin material,” he said, adding that he objects to the pejorative term “downcycling” when his company turns a single-use item into one that can last decades.

“We tend to look for a silver bullet. Chemical recycling’s going to save us all, some EPR is going to save us all, right? And it’s not,” King said. “It’s collaboration, it’s working together.”

When Ajit Perera, vice president of post-consumer operations at Talco Plastics in California, joined the state’s advisory board for its recycled-content law, he was the only plastics person in the room.

“Everyone wants to demonize plastics, let’s not use plastics, let’s go to something different, paper, so on and so forth,” he said of his fellow board members. “And I said my mantra here is actually to take the devil out of the plastics.

“I think we should all be passionate and we should push the word out that plastic is here to stay, and it can be only sustained if we recycle it,” Perera went on. “It’s up to us to go out there and preach.”

This article appeared in the May 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

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