Rethink Recycling

Designing next-generation packaging to create value from plastic waste

By Cheryl E. Harrison

In the 50’s plastics were considered a packaging miracle.  

The allure of beautiful, transparent, and brightly colored plastics captured the packaging market. Plastic packages were less costly to produce and transport than tin boxes, metal cans, and glass bottles.  These phenomenal plastics were also waterproof, air-tight, lightweight, durable, and unbreakable – so handy to carry and use.  Plastic packages cultivated “save and re-use” habits adopted by our grandparents. But, just a few decades later, a drastic shift became noticeable. Consumers, along with a fast-growing plastics industry, had changed their packaging behaviors to a “use and toss” mindset.

At each step of the supply chain, once a plastic package was out of sight, it was also out of mind. 

To reduce litter, the packaging industry rallied to widely promote a righteous recycling ethos ­­– including the sacrosanct three “R’s” - - recycle, reuse, and recover.  Over the years, this defining triangle-shaped symbol did not reap success for the effective recycling of plastics. Today, many responsible citizens do their part by tossing used packaging into whatever bin is at a throw’s reach and hope that their trash ends up in the right place.  They “wish-cycle” their waste and hope for the best.

Most plastic waste is not recyclable in practice.  In fact, the triangle symbols embossed on the bottom of our plastic packages don’t signify recyclability. These symbols may have a number in the center indicating the type of plastic - but this is no indication that the package has a chance for a second life.

Predictions of the cumulative environmental impacts of plastic waste are much worse than we ever anticipated.

One journal (Plos One) estimates that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 260,000 metric tons, now afloat in the world’s oceans. Within these ocean gyres, spins the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean with a vortex of plastic waste stretching more than 1.5 million square kilometers, twice the size of the State of Texas. Plastic fragments, macro, and micro-plastics are entering our environment at a record pace and are being ingested by living organisms, sea life, and humans.

Despite the ethos for recycling and sustainability, most of all plastic polymers produced upstream that become plastic packaging, end up “downstream” as waste.  In reality, less than 10% of our plastic waste is being recycled. Most of what reaches recycling centers get rerouted to landfills, dumped in rivers, and flows to oceans.

Here’s why.  Let’s look at a typical “end-of-life” cycle of plastics.

Recycling is a dirty, risky, difficult, noisy, and expensive business. Margins are slim yet investments are critical, continuous, and costly. Recycling is a weak link in the value chain.  Yet, investments in waste processing continue.  Recycling in America now represents $100 billion in economic activity, 500,000 jobs, and nearly $13 billion contributed by federal, state, and local tax revenues.   Despite grand plans and investments to build and modernize recycling facilities, plastic packaging continues to be a major culprit of environmental waste and litter.  

90% of plastics produced actively contaminate the world’s natural environments.

Additionally, there’s no consistency for waste processing methods. Every community across the U.S., and each municipality has its own unique waste processing rules, sorting system, capacities, with different technologies for processing collected waste materials. Many communities in the U.S. have no recycling infrastructure. Some community processing centers process glass, metals, and cartons, but don’t process any plastic waste.  Among the 633 recycling facilities operating in the U.S., a mere 185 plants are equipped to recycle plastics. 

Recycling centers process only the waste materials that can reap a re-market value. Among all recycled materials collected in the U.S., the recycling category for plastic waste wanes to a level of desperation. What arrives at the recycling facility gate is not necessarily recycled in practice as we may hope to believe.

There’s a logical reason why 96% of all flexible plastic packaging waste is not being recycled. Wrinkled and torn flexible packaging is caught in the large mechanical sorting drums, causing recycling plant shutdowns and costly challenges. Mixed plastic packaging is usually contaminated and too expensive to properly sort and separate into “pure” plastic streams.  Except for some plastic bottles and jugs, most plastic packaging cannot be sorted and has little or no after-market reuse value whatsoever.  These mixed “residue plastics'' become multicolored crushed plastic bales sold to landfills or informal secondary and tertiary markets. Their circuitous, stealth pathways into massive ocean gyres, cannot be traced.

Clearly, the plastic waste challenge has risen to a scale of runaway proportions. We ask, what is the next miracle for eliminating continuous flows of plastic packaging waste – as fast as possible?

Designing a Solution for Plastics – from Waste to Value

I propose a breakthrough approach for achieving zero-waste plastics.  

My solution places the motivator of money at the center point of 360-degree, circular re-use, value creation system.  It utilizes technologies available today.  Financial incentives are put into place to drive an integrated system for plastics that benefits manufacturers, brand companies, consumers, and recycling centers.  The goal achieves a circular economy that places the economic potential of plastics at its peak during each stage of its value chain.

The first step is packaging design. 

Goals originally intended from the 3 R’s of plastic recycling must translate to the re-design of value first plastic packaging that brings a high value to the raw materials that the package will eventually become. Instead of plastic packaging meeting an end of life “make waste” destiny, the packaging is created and produced as a live currency. 

Status quo for the industry has meant that plastic waste streams are not accurately monitored, nor are waste plastics valued. Within our current system, vast volumes of plastics are manufactured and stock-piled, irrespective of supply and demand in real-time, causing added virgin material waste. For company procurement purposes, there is no universal coding in place encouraging or mandating a recycled second life conversion process.

In other words, next-generation packaging should be re-designed with its economic destiny already planned, determined, and directed.

The second step is aggregated data intelligence.

An ability to uniquely track each package means that brands, consumers, and recycling centers receive economic value and positive incentives when the packages they touch receive a second life. Creators of packaging and consumers are financially rewarded with credits when their plastic packaging follows its intended path. They benefit from a value-based destiny of circular loops. Packages divert away from littering the oceans and flowing into toxic landfills. 

Let’s consider how a different approach to packaging design could bring supply chain value at all stages. A next-generation design system for packaging with aggregated data intelligence has a value-based flow of plastics at each stage – upstream, midstream, and downstream.

Upstream, when polymers are conceived, they are brought into the supply chain already having a predetermined destiny for a second life value.  These polymers are created knowing which types of product packages they are intended for including the complex properties essential for the products they will contain.  Alongside these polymers will be data certifications detailing their authentic molecular compositions to be sure they are used for their intended purposes and to track if they end up in the right places.  In this model, the polymers themselves guide how those packages will be optimized for their second lives.

At the packaging and product manufacturing factory, invisible codes are printed on each package. Embedded is a unique watermark containing a scannable “fingerprint”.  The watermark not only includes data about the polymer film type but also details its second life destination. Additionally, its digital label compiles pertinent information about the package’s product ingredients, packaging date and time, weight, temperature, and the product’s quality conditions along its distribution path. Along the way, sensors detect and relay its location in real-time. Data coding guides rapidly auto-sort along conveyor belts inside distribution warehouses.  Packages are hyper-directed for optimal retail distribution points.  At this juncture, the package has diverted all added costs of production, transportation, labor, energy, water, and excess materials. The package continually expands its one-of-a-kind cloud-based data fingerprint.

Aggregated data for each package continually connects each package to its responsible brand company owner.  Transparently, the package data is tracked and monitored. Already, with manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies gained, and with all data collected, this package is too valuable to be wasted.

Midstream, each package makes a discreet contribution to the “Internet of Things” carrying data, expanding its “intelligence” to interact dynamically within complex commercial transactions, expeditiously reaching the end consumer.  Each package helps to manage its own just-in-time journey, ensuring data feedback to both the manufacturer, brand company, and retailer. It also provides timely delivery tracking. While providing protection with pertinent product information to the consumer, the package offers a magnificently valuable interactive digital label with helpful instructions and personalized promotions and experiences. And, after the package is used, it facilitates pre-sorting and gives recycling incentives to the end consumer.

Packages reward consumers to make the right plastic sorting decisions. All packages are recycled by choice into pre-set sorting streams.  “Smart” sorting appliances in the home include scanners and compactors designed to locally pre-sort and process their plastic materials locally at their point of use. Point of use pre-sorting appliances is also onsite at local retail locations, offices, public spaces, hotels, living complexes, and restaurants, providing optimal plastic collection and recovery.

Once packages are placed into pre-sorting streams, consumers are incentivized for their good recycling habits.  This form of passive income encourages continued plastic recycling and circular reuse. It ignites a next-generation design system that not only serves the convenience and wallets of consumers but also changes consumer actions to achieve efficient, economically viable, more sustainable supply chains.

Brand companies, producers, and consumers alike are “rewarded” per package with additional credits earned for packages reaching the front gates of the recycling processing center. In this system, to encourage the continuous development of improved, more sustainable polymers, packages with greater circular re-use value receive higher trade credit and “e-credit” rewards.  They also circumvent, the usual waste recycling mayhem, routing straight through to end processing.

Downstream, at recycling facilities, the digital watermark tags facilitate auto-sorting of all plastic streams, allowing faster and much more profitable processing. “Pure” streams of pre-sorted plastics yield a high market value for Municipal Recycling Centers, Advanced Recycling Facilities, and Biomass Processing Plants.

Within a few months’ time, recycling and processing facilities are easily re-engineered with turnkey retrofits to add plastic processing lines with standardized “airflow tunnels” specifically designed for smart sensor sorting of plastic materials.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics facilitate fast, safe, efficient sorting at both ends of the tunnels.  This improved system results in the production of greater volumes of polymer types, scanned and filtered by type, aggregated, batched, and baled to fulfill market demands for certain very specific resins and raw material types. 

Pre-sorted plastics may be further processed through thermal heating, chemical and molecular conversion, and biomass processing, rendering a substantial new re-market value for plastics.

These plastic materials are used to make specific products such as furniture, clothing, durable goods, automobiles, industrial pipes, and construction materials. Thermo-heat processing purifies and converts certain grades of plastic materials into new virgin plastics. Other industrial processing for mixed residue plastics is directed for creating local carbon-free energy, syngas and hydrogen fuels, fertilizers, and industrial chemicals.  Biomass processing utilizes “residue” flexible plastics which are commonly contaminated with food scraps and bio-based materials. These bio-based plastics, from pure streams of bio-compostable polymers, are directed into environmentally safe anaerobic biomass processing for agricultural compost, valuable biomass energy, biogas, and biofuels.

Instead of recycling, as usual, these downstream solutions generate valuable resins and raw materials, with measurable, circular market value loops, without compromising the depletion of non-renewable resources.

Smart-Value Currency for Plastics

The circular economy can promote a future that transforms plastic into currency, from a waste stream into a value stream.  This is a systems approach to packaging design, that creates and manufactures packaging with the entire lifecycle in mind. 

The next-generation package knows what it will become before it is born.

Instead of meaningless indecipherable triangles symbols embossed on plastic packages of the past, polymer films themselves carry forth accurate, certified, and traceable data with intelligence to swiftly guide the package through its supply chain to reach its end-use and re-use destination. 

This next-generation, “smart-value” packaging can be created with technologies that are available today.  Due to the magical nature of molecular chemistry, combined with the fast-emerging science of spectral scanning, cloud-based data, artificial intelligence, and robotics, polymer material processing has the capacity to scale, repeating its re-purpose DNA – creating a continuous circular value loop.

As demand increases for renewable plastic raw material “feedstocks”, it is conceivable that plastic waste streams could be sold and traded on plastic futures markets.

With a no-waste circular systems model, the infinite “currency” of plastic does not cease.  Post-consumer plastic polymers shouldn’t be floating in rivers and oceans. Instead, plastics should be viewed as a continuous value to the world. They can drive sustainable economic commerce and bring waste-free efficiency into supply chains.  Existing waste plastics shall be cleaned up, never again to be found polluting our pristine environment.

Next-generation packaging designs out waste – unleashing a new era that considers waste plastics as currency. “Smart-value” packaging leads us to a zero-waste economy with a much cleaner future.

Let’s hope that we can create the next miracle for plastics! 

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The author, Cheryl E. Harrison is a Senior Director of PopPack LLC, Activator Member of the US Plastics Pact, and member of AIPIA (Active & Intelligent Packaging Industry Assoc.).  PopPack is a design-technology company in San Francisco, creating breakthrough commercial packaging alternatives to “design-out” packaging material waste.  These packaging solutions offer positive, convenient experiences for consumers, with increased value for both brand companies and packaging producers who are committed to circular economy goals. PopPack’s prototype development, commercial production and commercial licensing contracts are fulfilled through its operations in the USA and the Netherlands. www.poppack.com, www.viviaventures.nl  The ideas and concepts shared in this article are those of the author.

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