Hello world!
Some exciting updates! I finished my video presentation on the state of post consumer PET thermoform recycling for RECOUP’s plastics recycling conference Sept. 25th. Once the video is played to the RECOUP conference attendees it will be available on YouTube and our other social media channels. I have to say, filming yourself giving a presentation is one of the more awkward projects I have done as of late! Gosh I hope it makes sense…
Also, my analysis of my new Recycling Report was published in this week’s Plastics News. You can read it here. In a nutshell, I am totally confused. This is because I began my investigation into PET thermoform recycling in 2009 with the assumption that a free market for post consumer plastics recycling exists or can manifest with adequate generation, collection, reprocessing capability, and demand. I believed that post consumer PET recycling was a business that like any operated on the rules of supply and demand.
In my 2010 Recycling Report I reference an ACC statistic, which is that there has to be 400 million lbs of a particular plastic generated in the MSW stream for the recycling thereof to be profitable. I then reason that because there were over a billion lbs of PET thermoforms manufactured and available for recycling in North America that year, there is an economic motivation to recycle PET thermoforms, either within or separate from the bottle stream. Moreover, because the demand for PC PET by domestic reclaimers outweighs the supply, adding PET thermoforms to the collection stream would only help facilitate a more sustainable PET recycling market.
Here is an excerpt from the 2010 Report, where I outline my economic model for post consumer plastics recycling:
Those material/packaging types that are easy to collect post-consumer, transport, sort, clean, bale, and remanufacture enjoy the likelihood of being recycled because the cost of the resultant “recycled” material is competitive with the cost of virgin material production. For example, because PET bottles are made from high value resin and are “easy” to recycle, the remanufactured resin enjoys a value that allows it to compete with virgin, facilitating the continued recycling of PET bottles.
In my 2013 Recycling Report I explain how the thermoform and recycling industries collaborated to eliminate the barriers to PET thermoform recycling; this is super awesome. Now we can finally achieve a market driven post consumer PET recycling infrastructure, I argue, where retailer preference for post consumer PET packaging sends a signal to municipalities to invest in community collection efforts for PET packaging, thereby generating the needed supply of recycled and cost-competitive RPET for packaging manufacturers to meet the demands of its end customer. Sounds good, right?
Turns out, I am pretty much totally wrong? In conversations with representatives from international stewardship organizations and state recycling program directors while researching the state of PET thermoform recycling, a fundamental tension in my thesis developed, best explained as follows:
So Canada has had stewardship legislation on the books for several years now. After reviewing the annual fees associated with each packaging types’ recovery, I was totally dumb-founded to discover that the cost of recycling never becomes mitigated by the value of the secondary material/product, with the exception of aluminum, I do believe. What I found was that PET bottles, even though recycled the most and the easiest, still cost money to recycle that was not covered in the value of the recyclate. And, contrary to my belief, the more PET bottles recycled, the more money it cost, not the other way around! The idea of closing the loop by recycling post consumer collected PET packaging into RPET packaging in an economically sustainable model to facilitate the continued use and recycling of PET packaging may actually not be achievable after all?! What the what?!?
After my 2013 Recycling Report was published in Plastics in Packaging, I received an email from a respected competitor; he was disappointed that I did not advocate an entirely free-market approach for the future of post consumer plastics recycling. My colleague argued that any type of governmental intervention aimed at incentivizing collection or whatnot would disrupt the principles of free market capitalism that guided plastics recycling.
Ok. I get that. But how can the principles of the free market work if the existing supply system relies on tax-financed collection and policy mechanisms?
I am so totally and utterly confused. I am going to shelve my brain for a while.