Stronger recycling regulations can benefit plastics industry, panel says

Clearwater Beach, Fla. — Improving plastics recycling will require strong policies like mandated recycled content, bottle bills and extended producer responsibility, as well as support for newer technologies like chemical recycling.

At least that was the consensus of a panel of plastics companies and consumer goods firms at the Plastics News Executive Forum, where corporate sustainability chiefs noted public pressure to fix waste issues and said new laws could create more consistent, badly needed supplies of recycled plastic.

"We think ambitious recycled content mandates are going to be truly helpful," said Yvonne van der Laan, executive vice president of circular and low carbon resin maker LyondellBasell Industries NV. "We will support a 30 percent mandate in post-use plastic in packaging, not just in Europe but in the U.S. We've seen how that effects supply and demand."

As well, an executive at Altium Packaging, which includes high density polyethylene recycler Envision, said bottle bills would help boost "desperately needed" supplies of post-consumer resin.

States with bottle bills, also called container deposits, recycle those packages at a rate of 50-90 percent, while states without them recycle at 10-20 percent, said Brian Hankin, chief marketing and innovation officer at Altium.

"I never thought I'd say we need more federal legislation, but here I am saying it, because it just works," he said. The executives spoke at a panel at the forum, held March 11-13 in Clearwater Beach.

Similarly, an executive at snack food maker Mondelez International told attendees that global brands see the ongoing negotiations for a global plastics treaty as a chance to harmonize recycling policies worldwide around effective laws.

"When you think about the impacts from the [United Nations] global plastics treaty, this is an opportunity for businesses to move from this patchwork of national schemes and voluntary mechanisms toward global standardization," said Patrick Shewell, director of global sustainable packaging at Mondelez, which owns Oreo, Toblerone, Cadbury and other brands.

Mondelez is part of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which includes 200 global companies, financial institutions and other organizations.

The group released detailed policy prescriptions ahead of an upcoming round of treaty talks in April in Canada.

"The impacts are ginormous from policy," said Shewell. "We sense an opportunity for businesses now to be able to catalyze change globally around a set of standard rules that are applied across the 175 member states that are participating."

Global packaging maker Amcor Ltd. said laws like EPR for packaging can put value behind plastic waste that creates incentives for it to be collected.

"When you take that wrapper and throw it on the ground, there's not a lot of value there to incentivize someone to pick it up, and I think the industry has kidded itself for a long time to think there is," said David Clark, vice president of sustainability at Amcor.

"That's where this idea of EPR comes in, producer responsibility, because it attaches a value to the product if it stays in the circular system," he said. "The bottle deposit is a perfect example of that."

Four U.S. states — California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon — have passed EPR for packaging laws and more are considering it, building on much more established EPR programs in Europe and Canada.

As well, a U.S. Senate hearing in early March heard calls from another consumer product maker, S.C. Johnson Inc., for a national EPR law, because of the potentially confusing mix of state laws.

Hankin said Altium is already struggling with how to comply with the four separate state laws.

"It is really complex to manage all these different regulations across the four states," Hankin said. "Multiply that times 50 and it's completely overwhelming."

Similarly, Shewell said brands like Mondelez face higher costs and regulatory complexity from meeting EPR and other laws in the more than 100 countries where they sell products, as well as facing the potential for at least 20 U.S. states to adopt different rules around EPR in coming years.

"The inherent complexity and cost that goes with that is ginormous," Shewell said.

To make new recycling regulations like EPR work, the executives said policy makers have to allow chemical recycling technologies for plastics.

"It's the only technology that produces food-grade recycled content for flexible packaging," Shewell said.

"If you're a food company that's producing food grade packaging that's made in flexible plastics, if you don't have advanced recycling, you don't have PCR [post-consumer resin]," he said.

Clark said chemical recycling technology is needed to meet recycled-content mandates in flexible plastic film packaging, but he said decisions by some state regulators, like New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, to not allow chemical recycling to count as recycled content for those mandates will create a "catch-22 for our industry."

"When you're looking at polyolefins and flexible plastics, chemical recycling is going to be one of the key ways we can meet the needs of the circular economy," Clark said.

But Shewell also said the industry needs to build public trust that chemical recycling is environmentally safe for communities, and that the technology can be commercially successful.

"There's a lot of anxiety and distrust in the plastics value chain's ability to operate technologies that minimize environmental and social impact," he said.

"What we need to do as a value chain working together is to build confidence and trust, and we need to demonstrate that these technologies are scalable, that they're commercially viable, and more important than that, we need to demonstrate that we understand and can minimize any negative social and environmental impact."

Similarly, LyondellBasell's van der Laan said the industry in general needs to get outside its comfort zone to build public trust on these problems.

"As an industry, particularly the petrochemical industry, I think it's also very important that we realize we really have work to do to gain public trust," she said.

"As an industry, it truly means we have to get out of our comfort zone and engage with stakeholders who have different points of view and understand what drives those points of view."