Designing products & packaging for recovery

When it comes to making sure a product or a package is recyclable, there are many factors that come into play. During the session ‘Designing Products & Packaging for Recovery” on the third day of 2020 PPRCi, several industry experts shared their insight on the best strategies and methods to designing more sustainable products and packages for a more circular economy.

Following guidelines

First to speak during the session was CEO and President of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) Steve Alexander. He sat down with Recycling Today editor DeAnne Toto to discuss the guidelines APR has in place for companies when it comes to designing for recycling.

“It’s really come about over time and it’s transitioned over time,” Alexander said. “We meet every week to review new packaging that’s in the marketplace, new innovations in the marketplace, to make sure the design guide is actually reflecting what’s in the market.”

Alexander said changes are constant and some companies may think they’re taking the right steps but may not be, so it’s important to reevaluate.

“You think you’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Years ago, you could not put orange juice in a PET package, so it was in glass and there was a lot of breakage and spillage. Then the technology created a nylon barrier that you could put into a PET container so you could then use it for orange juice. What they found is once that got into the stream, that nylon barrier actually caused the recycling stream to yellow.”

Alexander added that companies are making sustainability goals, but it’s important that policy matches what’s happening so companies have something more concrete to strive for.

“You don’t ban plastic products, you’re always going to have a plastic product you have to deal with,” Alexander said. “We have to make sure we have the infrastructure to handle it properly, recycle it properly, so it has a second use.”

Maintaining sustainability

Second to speak during this session was Scott Byrne, assistant director of global sustainability with Sonoco, who had just joined the company a few weeks before speaking during 2020 PPRCi.

“We have these different product streams and we’re working in different ways throughout all of them,’ Byrne said. “On the paper side, one of the things we’re looking at is increasing the fiber content in a lot of our products.”

Byrne added that making these changes, to both plastic and paper products and packages, could make consumers recognize items as more recyclable, which could improve sustainability as a whole.

“There’s certainly a lot of challenges facing packaging and recycling,” he said.

One innovation that Sonoco is working on is black PET trays that aren’t recognizable by optical sorters in Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and to look at how coloring and other factors could make those trays recognizable.

“Sustainability, is not, in and of itself, a term,” he said, adding that there are just attributes of packaging that make something more sustainable.

The benefits of designing for recycling

The last speaker during this session was Bret Biggers, an economist with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). He shared his thoughts on designing for recycling with Recycling Today senior editor Brian Taylor and how ISRI started that initiative a few decades ago.

ISRI hands out awards each year to companies that excel in designing their products or packaging for recycling and said it’s important to reward companies for making those steps to improve recyclability and sustainability.

“Samsung’s an award winner, Dell’s and award winner, and they’re creating products, electronic products, that meet this goal from the beginning,” Biggers said. “Whereas 35 years ago, many electronics were not recyclable, many components were not recyclable, but now it’s even more recyclable.”

Biggers added that it’s important to look at all commodities as well, not just paper or plastic, because all commodities have room to improve their recyclability.

“ISRI does believe in using the established recycling markets and recycling infrastructure, with innovations,” Biggers said, speaking about plastic. “There’s new coatings, there’s new adhesives, there’s new inks. There’s going to be new materials and as manufacturers start looking at recycling as a piece of their equation for their product or package, they can adjust from the beginning.”