The ACC goal of recovering 100% of packaging polymers is bold but likely necessary to show that its members are focused on a full solution, rather than some sort of halfway step. The goal is broken down as follows:
- 100 percent of plastics packaging is reused, recycled, or recovered by 2040.
- 100 percent of plastics packaging is recyclable or recoverable by 2030.
- 100 percent of the U.S. manufacturing sites operated by ACC’s Plastics Division members will participate in Operation Clean Sweep-Blue by 2020, with all of their manufacturing sites across North America involved by 2022.
Goal number 2 is a prerequisite to goal number 1, in that all packaging polymer will need to be recyclable before all can be recycled. What this means depends on the breakdown of the recovery goals themselves. If the aim is to solve for collection first, which in our view is the core goal – eliminate plastic waste – then chemical recycling can play a major part in what comes after collection. This would make the sorting stage much easier as it would not be necessary to have complex sorting procedures and much of the work could be done by eliminating the materials that cannot be easily chemically recycled from the mix at source – i.e. not use any PVC or other complex polymers in packaging applications that will constitute the collected waste. Packagers certainly have time to react by 2030 and this would involve rethinking only a small piece of their packaging needs, mostly focused on compounded polymers with problematic additives.
But the piece of the ACC objective that will be problematic for its members will be the most critical in the ambitions of the first point, which is the collection of the waste. This is not done by the ACC members, and some far-reaching partnerships will be needed between waste companies, municipalities, packagers, and the chemical industry to make this work. Collaboration from consumers will also be important, but the stakeholders in the prior sentence need to make the change in behavior for consumers as easy as possible – such as “all plastic in one bucket”. There may be some durable polymer leakage into a “one bucket” policy, but standardizing colors around durables may solve the problem as it would make sorting easy. See our weekly ESG report to find more on recycling and plastic waste.
