Packaging success

DeAnne Toto

The Recycling Today Media Group hosted its annual Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference in Chicago Oct. 14-16, 2015. While many topics were on the agenda, including market forecasts, pricing indices and education, many sessions also touched on the positive changes that have led to the use of more recycled content in consumer packaging as well as consumer products companies’ work to increase the recyclability of their packaging, whether it be paper or plastics based.

Anna Lynott, senior consultant for Resource Recycling Systems, Ann Arbor, Michigan, who spoke during the session “The Evolution of Commercial Recycling,” said a number of factors had changed in commercial recycling while others had remained constant. Among those constants, she said, were the need to understand a company’s waste stream, to monitor and educate consistently, to have top-to-bottom engagement and to make participation easy.

Those areas of the commercial recycling sector that have evolved, Lynott said, were the composition and types of materials in the waste stream and increased engagement on the part of manufacturers as they work to understand how their packaging material flows through material recovery facilities (MRFs).

Michael Lettre, national accounts manager at Sonoco Recycling, headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, who also spoke during the session, said decisions about recycling were moving from the plant level to the corporate level with the goal of outsourcing this function.

“A lot of packaging customers have zero-waste as a goal. They want solutions outside of waste to energy,” Lettre said, adding that these companies are focused on reusing material to the fullest extent possible or on not generating waste at all.

Some packaging materials are more easily recycled and incorporate more recycled content than others, and paper packaging definitely falls in this category.

Corrugated containers contain recycled content, are easily recycled and are solidly in demand, even as China scales back its reliance on exported goods, according to the article “Ready to Ship,” starting on page S6. The future looks bright for this grade in part because demand for old corrugated containers (OCC) is likely to increase in the U.S. in the years ahead.

Molded pulp is another example of packaging that both contains recycled content and is easily recycled at the end of its life. The material has replaced polystyrene foam packaging in some applications, such as electronics.

Chris Miget, president of EnviroPAK, a St. Louis-based maker of molded pulp packaging, writes about the attributes of this packaging that are making it an attractive choice for some companies in the article “What’s Old is New Again,” beginning on page S28.

While some sectors of the paper manufacturing industry, such as newspapers and printing and writing papers, have suffered in recent years, other areas have growth potential, as these articles illustrate.