Kickstart: Gearing up against cutting single-use plastics

Even for those of us who try to pay attention, knowing what to recycle is confusing. Labels can be vague, standards are different from city to city and you wonder if what you toss into the bin really winds up as some new product.

But a new effort funded by charitable foundations associated with plastics additive maker Milliken & Co. and Walmart Inc. hopes to cut through some of the confusion.

The Center for Sustainable Behavior & Impact, which launched Aug. 3 as part of The Recycling Partnership, hopes to pair behavioral sciences with efforts to expand access to recycling.

They say they want to better understand consumer barriers and sentiments around recycling, scientifically test their ideas and create a playbook for recycling programs. It includes starting a new Recycling Confidence Index.

Milliken President and CEO Halsey Cook said the work could help with plastics waste.

"The Center's work to build consumer confidence and equitably overcome barriers to residential recycling will become a critical element of our strategy to solve the plastics end-of-life challenge," said Cook, who also is chairman of Milliken's charitable foundation.

The effort includes an advisory board of six marketing and waste management experts, including Suzanne Shelton, whom careful readers of this publication might remember got a lot of attention at our Plastics News Executive Forum in March.

There, she basically told the plastics audience that her polling suggests the public won't listen to much of anything the industry has to say until it believes ocean plastic and recycling are being fixed.

One plastics trade group is gearing up to fight a proposal from President Joe Biden's administration to reduce government purchasing of single-use plastics.

The Plastics Industry Association launched a website and campaign in recent days to push back on a July plan from the General Services Administration.

GSA is asking whether government procurement programs should restrict single-use plastics as part of broader Biden administration efforts to fight climate change.

The plastics association is arguing that limiting plastics purchases would actually make it harder to mitigate damage from climate change, because alternatives take more energy to manufacture and can have a higher environmental footprint.

"The launch of the web page demonstrates that the plastics industry is taking the proposed rule seriously and highlights the impacts it will have on everything from infrastructure, construction, shipping, consumers and even national parks," the association said.

The industry campaign comes as GSA is in the middle of taking formal public comments, which are due by Sept. 6.

It's all very early stage. The National Park Service in June announced its own plan to phase out single-use plastics in parks by 2032, but GSA, which sets procurement policies across the whole of government, is not proposing anything like that, at least yet.

It's basically asking for input on what it should do.

As Jim Johnson reports for us, prices for bales of recycled PET have been brutal these days.

There's both national trends, like softness in the housing market hurting demand for carpet made from recycled bottles, as well as California-specific impacts, like buyers from Mexico pulling back or the state's recycled-content bottle laws.

One, Ming's Recycling Corp. in Hayward, Calif., said it's never seen so much excess inventory in its 30-plus years in operation, as prices have cratered.

Some sources were telling Jim they expect the market to stay down for a few months before things improve later in the year.

Not a big surprise, but things are similar on the virgin PET resin side. Frank Esposito reported this week that PET bottle resin is down 12 cents in July, giving back most of a 13-cent price increase in June.