Plastic Pollution: New Legislation May Require Food Industry to Recycle Their Waste

There’s also an emphasis to make clearer and more prominent how-to-recycle labels on packages. “Switzerland’s recycling rates for PET are somewhere approaching 90 percent,” says Sand, “so it could be just as simple as [creating] better labels that help consumers pre-sort better so that facilities have less sorting to do.”

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition launched a How2Recycle program in 2012 that works with brands to complete an evaluation of a product’s recyclability and create a standardized labeling system that clearly communicates recycling instructions to the public. “We have given more than 80,000 recommendations to date,” says Goodrich. “The industry is getting much wiser in terms of what types of labels and adhesive to use to make sure their package stays recyclable and communicate that to consumers.”

In fact, major brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Danone, Kellogg, McCormick, and Nestlé have made public commitments to make their packaging 100-percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025 via multifaceted initiatives and aggressive timetables. “This has really been gathering steam in the last six months,” says Goodrich.

For example, Fuji pledged to make all of its plastic bottles from 100-percent recycled plastic (rPET); Coca-Cola pledged to make all of its packaging recyclable by 2025, and to use 50 percent recycled content by 2030; and PepsiCo has stated that its goal is to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable by 2025 and reduce its use of virgin plastics by 35 percent.

The more plastic that’s recycled, the more recycled plastic will be available to manufacturers to use in new packages, creating an efficient circular system and feedback loop.

How Technology Can Help

Sorting materials, particularly in single-stream recycling systems popular in the U.S., is a time-consuming task that technological advances may help streamline. Whereas a worker may be able to sort 30 to 40 items per minute, a robot could double that rate and an optical sorter may get through upward of hundreds or even thousands of picks per minute via machine-learning software and sensors that recognize visual patterns associated with specific items.

Meanwhile, flex wrap plastic packaging is uniquely difficult to collect and sort. For one, it’s often a multi-layered material, all of which may not be recyclable and is difficult to separate to sort. Bread bags, which are made from the same material as milk jugs, should be recyclable but they are a handling nightmare for the facilities because they get sucked into the machines.

Advanced flex wrap packing that’s cost effective to produce and won’t add to pollution is currently being researched and developed. One company is experimenting with extracting the protein from natural silk to create a protective layer to wrap produce in place of single-use plastic, for example. Meanwhile, the industry may want to consider novel solutions, says Sand. “With the difficulty with recycling flex wrap, maybe this is a case where a compostable option should be considered,” she says. “Or can we treat them like corrugated cardboard and compress them into a more easily handled form.”

Despite novel solutions and tech, some argue the biggest hope for addressing plastic pollution involves putting an economic, environmentally based price tag on packaging. “The reason that aluminum is recycled at high rates in the U.S. is because it’s economically valuable,” says Sand. “If recycled PET’s value went up, then, boy, we would figure out how to recycle it.”