The world is creating an extraordinary amount of plastic waste; every corner of the planet is affected, and with few exceptions, no one knows its effects.
By 2040, there would be an additional two to three times the current amount of plastic waste produced. The high production could worsen the health consequences related to plastic pollution.
“There is a lot of space for shifting plastic packaging to other materials,” says Jim Palardy at Pew and coauthor of a report about reducing pollution with alternatives.
Among the most common plastics on the market are polyethylene, polypropylene(PP), polyethylene terephthalate(PET) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Let’s dive deeper into these plastics types and how they can be recycled to ensure a convenient process.
The most easily recycled plastics are PET and HDPE, which are used to make soft drink bottles or containers. What makes recycling difficult is when different plastics need to be separated in order to be recycled, such as when different types of plastic are mixed together. However, studying the feasibility of recycling varying types of plastics remains at an early stage.
Companies who focus on creating new packaging are now finding success by taking a collaborative approach to the manufacturing process with their suppliers. Marco ten Bruggencate, commercial vice president of packaging and specialty plastics at Dow, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, says “You have to take into account the function of the product and design a suitable polymer that will last.” by focusing on polyethylene (PE) and its advanced functionality with products such as shampoo bottles, food packaging film.
Manufacturers know how to recycle 80%–90% of all packaging, says Ten Bruggencate. But there is still the challenge of finding solutions for the remainder, such as one-polymer packaging used mainly for cheese and meat. The challenge is designing packaging that keeps meat fresh but uses only one kind of polymer (rather than a complex structure of different polymers), says Ten Bruggencate. “You have to be able to innovate so you can reproduce all these functionalities within one polymer,” he says.
Other businesses are boosting recyclability by using more clear plastic. Drinks bottles are made of easy-to-recycle PET, but if dye is added to them, the colors merge during recycling and produce a gray recyclate that is hard to then sell. “Recyclers tell me the clear PET bottle is worth twice as much to them,” Thompson says. Coca-Cola is rolling out clear bottles in North America made from 100 percent recycled PET. It’s already using clear bottles in Asia and Europe.