Amid economic headwinds, new industry coalition aims to boost PP recycling

Nashville, Tenn. — Recycling of polypropylene packaging like yogurt cups and margarine containers faces some sizable challenges, but a new industry group is launching with the ambitious goal of trying to transform it into a mainstay of household curbside recycling like PET and high density polythylene bottles.

The Polypropylene Recycling Coalition sees a chance to build on some momentum in domestic PP recycling and — in the wake of China's ban on imported recyclables that upended markets — capture recyclable polypropylene that had been sent overseas or landfilled.

But the effort faces clear headwinds, like PP currently having some of the lowest recycling rates for major resins in packaging in the U.S. And some question whether it will make economic sense for local government recycling programs to pull PP.

The city recycling programs that will be needed to collect the PP, for example, are cash-strapped after China's National Sword program in 2018 cut off what had been a major export market for the traditionally lower-value plastics, like PP, that they collect.

Still, industry officials see a chance, with technology like robotic sorting and other efforts, to build stronger markets for polypropylene, a material that's widely used — if little recycled — in packaging.

One of the new factors that makes the coalition think it could work are commitments from consumer product companies to use post-consumer resins detailed in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastics Economy project, said Ali Blandina, director of circular ventures with The Recycling Partnership, which is the lead organization in the PP coalition.

The group aims to bring in a range of stakeholders, including recyclers, plastic packaging companies, resin suppliers and consumer product companies.

Blandina said the coalition's ultimate goal is to make PP widely recycled in curbside systems.

"With the commitment, focus and action-oriented solutions-based efforts of this coalition, we will bring polypropylene to the same levels as PET and HDPE," she said.

Coalition members, though, say they have to start now.

"It's a critical time now to invest in the long-term viability of polypropylene [recycling] and in our ability to collect it and sort it," said Steve Alexander, president of the Washington-based Association of Plastic Recyclers.

The coalition will formally launch in April, when it will announce targets and investments. But officials have been discussing it in industry meetings, like APR's member company gathering Feb. 20 in Nashville, Tenn.

"There's an immediate need to ensure the long-term viability of PP plastic as an accepted and recycled material," APR said in materials distributed at the meeting.

Industry officials point to data from The Recycling Partnership that show U.S. single-family homes annually use 827,000 tons (or 1.65 billion pounds) of products packaged in PP. That works out to 17 pounds a year per household.

That's just one-third of the volume of PET bottles, but it's enough PP, they say, to generate a viable stream. Alexander said APR estimates that about 175,000 tons, or 350 million pounds, would support a national infrastructure for PP recycling.

Still, very little of that PP packaging is recovered today. PP is recycled at much lower rates than other common plastics in packaging.

EPA municipal solid waste data for 2017, the last year available, reported that less than 3 percent of PP containers and other packaging were recycled, compared with 25 percent for PET, 15.5 percent for HDPE and about 9 percent for grades of low density PE.

The Recycling Partnership and APR said the new coalition is ultimately aiming for a 30 percent recycling rate for PP, to align with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's definition of recyclable.

Blandina said HDPE and PET have higher recycling rates, but they've been in the curbside system for a long time while discussions around PP started in recent years. She pointed to cities like Sarasota, Fla., that have been able to increase PP recycling.

"We're not creating new infrastructure, but we're creating a pathway toward effectively using what exists for polypropylene and supporting innovations and advancements in technology," Blandina said. "Our goal is to improve polypropylene recycling specifically by convening stakeholders across the value chain and multiplying the impacts they would've had on their own."

But others question the economics or note uncertainty around whether PP collected for recycling is actually recycled.

A February report from Greenpeace, for example, surveyed 367 U.S. materials recovery facilities and found that only 53 percent of them accept PP, compared to 100 percent for PET.

It said that just 31 percent of the U.S. population had access to recycling programs that collected polypropylene tubs and containers.

"The economics of collecting, sorting and recycling post-consumer polypropylene are becoming even more stressed and do not provide a sufficient driver for a MRF to invest in collection or separation of PP," Greenpeace said.

It noted that the average value of a bale of post-consumer PP had fallen more than 50 percent between summer 2019 and January.

As well, PP packaging recently got downgraded over recycling access concerns.

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition in January officially downgraded PP from "widely recycled" to "check locally" in its How2Recycle guidelines for labeling around recyclability on products.

There's "uncertainty around how many of those programs ultimately may be landfilling or incinerating the material, and to what extent challenges for PP recycling will continue to trend," SPC said.

Greenpeace puts PP in a category of hard-to-recycle plastics and argued that in the wake of China's policies limiting plastic waste imports, MRFs have so many difficulties finding viable end markets for them that they should not be marketed as recyclable on packaging.

It said PP, along with other plastics resin types 3-7, should not be labeled recyclable under U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines.

Greenpeace has been contacting some companies to change their packaging labeling, and some have agreed. It also said it may file formal FTC claims against others.

Only PET and HDPE packaging are recycled in enough communities to be legitimately labeled recyclable, Greenpeace said.

But Alexander argued that conditions are changing for PP. He said some MRFs have been retooling their lines to handle more PP, and the plastics recycling industry has pushed for it.

"There's actually a lot more recycled PP in the marketplace today than there has been historically," Alexander said.

One of the largest PP reprocessing companies in the U.S., KW Plastics Recycling in Troy, Ala., also said there's growing domestic demand for PP recyclate. But KW also noted challenges for MRFs to invest in PP recovery.

"We've got the headwind of what's happened in Asia," said KW General Manager Scott Saunders. "A lot of material recovery facilities have focused on paper and getting their paper cleaned up, which has slowed down the advancement of polypropylene recycling.

"But we believe there's a very good future for it and there will continue to be investments in processing as materials become available," Saunders said.

KW started recycling PP food containers in a serious way in 2012, when some containers began to shift away from polystyrene and volumes of PP picked up.

He said the Greenpeace report "is accurate in the fact that there is not as much recycling of polypropylene today as PET and HDPE" but he argued that PET and HDPE have a head start because they've been widely accepted in curbside programs for more than 20 years.

"There is good demand for polypropylene and it is growing, but it's something we've got to stay with," Saunders said.

Keefe Harrison, CEO of The Recycling Partnership, said that to "get polypropylene over the line so it's as common as PET," it will be important to consider larger problems like the low cost of landfills and inexpensive virgin resin.

She said Greenpeace "did a lot of really thorough work talking to MRFs" but said broader economic questions facing those MRFs have to be addressed.

"We need to ask what's informing the economics," she said. "Landfills in this country are half as expensive as sending a truck to recycling."