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.

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.

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.