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

Glass Half Full, a Gulf Coast glass processor with an environmental focus, needed a bigger facility as soon as its first one opened, CEO Franziska Trautmann said in a recent interview. As the concrete slab for a new facility is poured on the coast of Louisiana, she’s already imagining the 3 acres filled with glass.

“We pretty much said go big,” Trautmann said. “Ever since we started, it’s always felt like there was more demand for glass recycling than we’ve been able to handle. It’s always felt like we were piling up glass and struggling to process it and satisfy everyone.”

The new facility, located on a capped landfill in Chalmette, Louisiana, is sited on 3 acres of land and will be indoor-outdoor, she said. It should be operational by early 2025, and at full capacity could handle up to 150 tons of glass per day.

That’s needed capacity, because Trautmann’s vision is to handle all the glass within a 200-mile radius of New Orleans.

“There’s always been a huge lack of glass recycling in the region, and so we’ve always felt like the only way to go is up,” she said. “Louisiana and Mississippi, especially, consistently are toward the bottom of the list in terms of recycling as a state, and so we’re trying to just reach out to these communities. We just launched in Mobile, Alabama. We’re starting to expand where we can collect from, so we can just fill this plant with glass and get as much recycled as possible.”

Glass is easy in theory to recycle, but it’s hard to transport, heavy and difficult to collect. If it runs through a MRF, contamination rates are high. And the domestic industry has been in flux lately, with several facility closures and bankruptcies. As Glass Half Full illustrates, there are nonetheless hopeful spots.

Bob Hippert, sustainability strategy leader for manufacturing at O-I Glass, said glass recycling as a whole is in an interesting place. O-I has a network of manufacturing facilities but also has two glass-to-glass facilities that recycle glass into cullet in Oregon and Colorado. He pointed to the April acquisition of Strategic Materials by European glass recycling powerhouse Sibelco as an event that will spark a lot of domestic change.

“I actually think we’re in a good position, because there’s been a lack of investment in the cullet and the glass recycling processing area in the U.S. for probably the last 10 to 15 years,,” Hippert said. “I believe that what Sibelco is going to bring to the table is some renewed investment in a way that’s going to help drive improved quality of the furnace-ready cullet that can be used by glass plants, but also at a time when we’ve really seen kind of a degradation in the amount of material available in the market.”

Growing out of modest roots

Glass Half Full started in a backyard in 2020, with Trautmann and co-founder Max Steitz looking to recycle glass bottles from their friends and themselves. Word got out, demand exploded, and soon the business was moving into a 40,000-square-foot facility. But in 2022, the founders saw a need to scale up.

“We started fundraising at least a year and half ago, seriously, trying to raise some funds,” Trautmann said. “It was definitely a long time coming, and finally in April or so, all of the pieces started fitting together.”

That included a seed funding round that raised $6.5 million, led by Benson Capital Partners and supported by Momentum Fund and Innovation Catalyst. The Meraux Foundation and AMCREF Community Capital also supported the expansion.

“We are thrilled to partner with Glass Half Full to help further the company’s mission towards sustainability,” Gayle Benson, BCP’s founder, said in a written statement. “Through our combined dedication to green jobs and coastal restoration, we are excited to propel access to glass recycling for the entire Gulf South region.”

Back in 2022, Glass Half Full had five employees and 1,000 volunteers collecting 100,000 pounds of glass a month through neighborhood pickup and drop-off programs, grinding it into sand to be used in sandbags and coastal restoration pilot projects.

Now there are more than 20 employees, as well as a fleet of trucks and vans to do commercial and residential collection. The new facility will have enough space to allow Glass Half Full to produce cullet as well as satisfy the growing demand from restoration projects and for sandbags.

A local environmental benefit

Glass Half Full’s work falls at the intersection of two major sustainability issues: the immense global demand for sand and the widespread loss of beaches and coastlines, including along the Gulf. Human usage of sand for concrete, glass and other applications exceeds its natural production, according to a 2019 UN report. And the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reported that climate change and other forces have eroded coastal beaches and wetlands, making the region more vulnerable to severe storms and sea level rise.

The sand that Glass Half Full produces completed baseline safety testing for Louisiana marsh restoration and has now moved on to demonstration projects — one of which is right next door to the new facility, Trautmann said.

Two new islands have been built there and planted with marsh grass. One island is made of sand from Glass Half Full and the other from sediment dredged from the Mississippi River. Over the next five years, researchers will monitor both islands to see if there are any differences between the two.

The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the Pointe au Chien Indian Tribe have also received sand for restoration projects. Next up are dune and beach restoration projects, in and out of the state, Trautmann added, and there is governmental interest from as far away as Delaware.

Commercial recycling and drop-off bring in the most volume, Trautmann said, but the company is also expanding its services into Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard, Slidell, Mandeville, Covington and Baton Rouge in Louisiana, as well as Birmingham, Alabama, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
In Jefferson Parish, close to New Orleans, Glass Half Full is experimenting with single-stream recycling collection, which goes to a local MRF. But glass is still the focus, Trautmann said.

“It feels like there’s a lot of glass out there just going straight to landfill,” Trautmann said — less than a third of glass containers were recycled in the U.S. in 2018, according to the U.S. EPA’s most recent estimate.

“There’s so much potential in how much we can grow glass recycling across the U.S. and especially for us, we’re pretty focused on the South and Southwest, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida,” she continued. “We want to ideally be in those states collecting millions and millions of bottles and turning them into a useful resource.”

The Glass Recycling Coalition and other glass recyclers have been supportive since the beginning, Trautmann added.

“SMI, Ripple, there are a lot of great people in the industry. We have a common goal of recycling more glass.”

The wider industry picture

Looking to packaging extended producer responsibility laws, Hippert at O-I said he’s pushing for deposit return systems to be paired up with the incoming legislation in states where there’s not an existing bottle bill, such as Colorado.

“If you just have an EPR (program), you lose sight of a lot of potential glass and a lot of material streams, so to me it’s really important that you’re able to capture all that,” he said.

In addition, DRS programs tend to provide a much cleaner stream of material.

“They really protect quality and minimize contamination of the various streams, whether it be aluminum, plastics or glass, versus single-stream where everything gets commingled and you have to try to unscramble the egg,” Hippert said.

In EPR states that already have DRS, such as Oregon and California, Hippert is working with CAA, “making sure that they know that the glass has got a home in Oregon.”

California will also be a state to watch, Hippert noted. California used to be a net exporter of glass for recycling, Hippert said, but now in order to meet its longstanding minimum recycled content mandates, the state is importing glass – and there are some new players in the market, such as Gallo, which may have contributed to Strategic Materials filing for bankruptcy last year, before it was bought by Sibelco.

Looking ahead

What comes next in the industry? O-I is not planning to build any more glass-to-glass plants of its own, Hippert said, but the company is scaling up the amount of recycled content it uses.

Jim Woods, who is in corporate affair for O-I Glass, added that O-I has “ambitious sustainability goals to increase our cullet use,” which include increasing recycled content 50% by average by 2030.

“That is why Bob and everybody are doing this work in improving recycling,” he said. “We want more cullet.”

O-I is setting itself up for a future of more demand for glass and glass recycling, especially with incoming recycled content mandates and consumer desire to move to non-plastic packaging.

“People are looking back to glass,” Woods said. “It just makes sense from a business and an environmental perspective to use as much recycled glass as we can.”

In addition, Hippert said he is looking to improve efficiency at the Denver glass-to-glass facility, which O-I purchased from Momentum Denver in May 2022. The two companies had formerly worked together before Momentum ran into trouble.

Today, the Denver plant is running at 40% or 50% capacity “because they can’t get enough glass in the front door,” he added, and it’s largely MRF glass. While he anticipates more funding coming out of the EPR program for glass clean up systems, those are still years away.

“Everyone is kind of like, all right, let’s wait and see what happens. And so that’s the challenge where we’re butting up against right now,” he said.

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

Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo, Mars — one by one, many of the largest consumer goods companies in North America have said in recent months that they simply won’t meet their self-imposed deadlines for increasing recycled content and related goals.

The chorus of unmet expectations has also been consistent in pinning the blame on lagging recycling infrastructure.

“When we first set our goals, we used the best information available at the time to develop a credible but stretching plan,” wrote Pablo Costa, Unilever’s global head of packaging, in a statement this year outlining the company’s progress towards recycling targets. The company’s goals were intentionally ambitious, Costa noted, including an aim to reduce virgin plastic use by half.

“This has proved more challenging than any of us anticipated at the time,” Costa continued. “Assumptions made on the development of new technologies and infrastructure have simply not materialized as they are not fully in our control.”

Other industry watchdogs are less passive in identifying the reason for missed targets.

“Action is not keeping pace with ambition,” stated the Plastic Promises Scorecard, a report co-authored by shareholder activist group As You Sow and environmental consulting firm Ubuntoo.

In analyzing 225 companies for their work on plastic packaging and recyclability, the report found most companies had recyclability, reduction or recycled content goals and that an increasing number of companies supported policies like EPR. But most of those 225 companies “are not on track to meet the goals they have set.”

Companies vary in PCR targets

Brands are facing shortfalls in a variety of target areas. Unilever was one of the first to publicly acknowledge it would probably miss its goals for recyclability, reusability, or compostability, and its virgin plastic reduction goal, for example. On post-consumer resin use, the company is actually doing well: It used 22% recycled plastic in 2023, up from 21% in 2022 and 18% in 2021, and so is on track to meet its 2025 goal of 25%.

PepsiCo has also reported steady increases in PCR use, although it has a long way to go to meet its 50% goal for 2030. The company reported 10% PCR in its plastic packaging in 2023, up from 7% in 2022 and 6% in 2021.

Some companies have made less progress in PCR inclusion. Mars, for example, has a goal to use 30% PCR by 2025 but in 2023 used an average of only 1.5% across its packaging portfolio.

Part of the differing progress comes down to the types of packaging the companies use. Mars uses a great deal of flexible packaging, which doesn’t have the same infrastructure as PET bottles, the company noted, adding in its report, “We are working with governments and NGOs to address this, while also exploring redesign or alternative packaging formats.” Those redesigns could include moving from multilayer to monolayer material, or moving from plastic to paper and compostable packaging.

The U.S. Plastics Pact has taken these material nuances into account when outlining the goals signatory companies will strive for in the next five years.

The pact is one of about a dozen interconnected pacts around the world, which were formed to help plastics stakeholders meet pledges they’ve made under the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative. In 2020, the U.S. pact released a list of four key goals its numerous stakeholders would work toward by 2025. This year, the pact reported on progress and outlined goals for 2030.

On the recycled content front, the pact’s initial 2025 goal was simple and standardized: “Achieve an average of 30% post-consumer recycled content or responsibly sourced biobased content across all plastic packaging.”

By the end of 2022, the average across the pact’s signatories was 9.4%, short of the goal, but the pact’s updated 2030 targets show significant variance by packaging type. The report indicated pact signatories had strategies in place to achieve 25% PCR inclusion in PET, HDPE and PP beverage bottles by 2026 and 60% by 2030. For household cleaning bottles and containers of the same materials, they said they’ll reach 25% by 2028 and 50% by 2030.

For PET and PP thermoforms, pact companies said they’ll hit 20% minimum by 2028 and 40% minimum by 2030. And for commercial secondary film, such as pallet wrap, they said they’ll hit 15% PCR by 2028 and 30% PCR by 2030.

For the flexible materials challenging companies like Mars, the pact did not yet set a goal or target date but instead noted that in the next year, it will develop guidance “for increasing PCR in food-contact packaging, including blow-molded products, injection-molded products, and film that contacts the product.”

Plastic use on the rise

Even as companies deepen their understanding of how to meet recycling goals, one notable trend is brand owners using more plastic even as their goals call for reduction.

Besides its PCR goal, when Mars signed onto the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment the company set targets that 100% of its packaging would be reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 and that it would reduce its use of virgin plastic by 25% by 2025 versus 2019.
The company has actually backslid on virgin reduction, according to its latest sustainability report published on July 24. But as of 2023, 61% of Mars packaging is designed to be recyclable, reusable or compostable, up from 57% in 2022.

“We are making good progress, and we would expect that to continue to accelerate,” the company wrote. “However, the design and infrastructure changes needed are taking longer than we anticipated when we signed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitments, and we are unlikely to fully meet them by the end of 2025.”

On the third point, virgin plastic reduction, the company has moved in the other direction: Against a 2019 baseline of 180,000 metric tons of plastic packaging, Mars used 210,000 metric tons of plastic packaging in 2023, the company reported. And with recycled content totaling 1.5%, or 3,150 metric tons, that suggests Mars used 206,850 metric tons of virgin resin in 2023, which is 15% higher than the 2019 baseline.

Still, Mars reported in the latest sustainability update that it is “investing millions of dollars to improve the recyclability of our packaging, increase the amount of food-safe, recycled content and to reduce the use of virgin plastic.”

Mars is not alone in increasing its plastic use, even as it has targets in mind to reduce material consumption. For example, Amazon recently reported it used 88,698 metric tons of plastic packaging globally in 2023, higher by 3% from 2022. Amazon cited its business growth, reporting a 12% rise in full-year net sales for 2023. Globally, the company delivered nearly 6 billion packages, also higher by about 12% over 2022.

Similarly, despite PepsiCo pledging in 2021 to reduce virgin plastic use by 20% by 2030, the latest report indicates PepsiCo’s virgin resin use has increased by 6% since then.

As You Sow noted this trend in its report: “Despite setting a variety of plastics related goals, for many companies plastic use continues to increase as revenue increases,” the report stated. The report suggests using an alternative metric of “plastic intensity,” which it defines as plastic use per dollar of revenue.

“A laudable number of companies (100) have a goal to reduce use of primary or virgin plastic, yet the focus on reducing virgin plastic, rather than on reducing overall plastic intensity, paints an inaccurate picture of action toward plastic pollution prevention,” the report stated.

Mars is also not alone in investing in the recycling system to improve the conditions that have led to the target shortfalls. Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz and Procter & Gamble are among several steering committees and funders of the PET Recycling Coalition, an initiative of The Recycling Partnership that launched in 2022, for instance.

Over the past two years, the initiative has distributed more than $5 million in grants, resulting in the addition of 29 million pounds per year of recycled PET that previously had not been captured, according to the group’s first annual report. Keurig Dr Pepper and Procter & Gamble are also among the funders of TRP’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition, which takes a similar approach to that material.

Antoinette Smith contributed to this report.