APR, Europe's RecyClass working to ‘harmonize' recycling guidelines

Grapevine, Texas — An effort to harmonize recycling guidelines for plastics packaging in the United States and Europe is making progress a year into the collaboration, participants say.

But the heavy lifting is still to come.

Officials at both the Association of Plastic Recyclers in the United States and RecyClass in Europe understand that making their respective packaging recycling guidance as similar as possible will ultimately help bring more used plastic to recyclers.

But getting to that point will take time, they say.

Just agreeing to work together was a big deal, said Scott Trenor, technical director for APR.

"That's the big first step. After that, we spent lots of time looking at our respective guidance, understanding that in many cases they are not that far apart, so let's try to figure out the easier spaces that we can align," he said.

Working in those so-called easier spaces has been a focus this first year, he said, as the two sides sought to gain momentum to now tackle more challenging areas.

"We'll continue to chip away," he said. "I think with any process you start with the largest volumes and work down to the details. Start with the easy stuff just to show people that we can do this. As we build momentum, target some of the more specific packaging issues," Trenor said in an interview at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in Grapevine.

Multinational companies, which use large amounts of plastics around the world in their packaging, will find the recycling landscape easier if there is a unified set of guidelines, he said. And that will lead to more plastic being recycled and used again.

Fabrizio Di Gregorio is technical director for Plastics Recyclers Europe, the group that launched the RecyClass guidance program.

RecyClass and APR hope that unifying rules will have an even bigger impact not only in the United States and Europe but also around the world as others look for guidance, Di Gregorio said.

While APR and RecyClass seek harmonization, there always will be some differences between guidance in the United States and Europe, he said. The two groups have just issued a report on chart progress to date.

"It's impossible to have 100 percent such alignment," he said. "Working on fact basis and scientific approach, we are tying to close the gap as much as we can in setting harmonized design for recyclability criteria," he said.

Legislative differences in the United States and the European Union mean some guidelines will not be aligned. Di Gregorio pointed to recycled resin for food contact packaging as one area, for example, where he believes the guidance will continue to differ even after the harmonization project.

"For the things that are not impossible to align we are really working hard and to understand what the compromise we can reach," De Gregorio said.

"We have two years of work ahead of us. I'm pretty convinced in the next two years we will finalize the harmonization, also explaining to the industry for the items where we are not be aligned and why we are not going to align," he said.