Canada plastics pact members have ‘eyes wide open' on costs to go green

Canada recycles just 12 percent of its plastic packaging — about 21 percent of its rigid containers but only 1 percent of its flexible packaging. A new plan released Oct. 21 from some major consumer product companies and other groups, however, hopes to change that.

The Canada Plastics Pact released a road map outlining actions its member companies, including big brands like Coca-Cola Canada and Walmart Canada, will undertake to recycle or compost 50 percent of plastic packaging by 2025 and meet other targets.

Pact leaders acknowledge they have very ambitious goals but say that since the dozens of companies in the group collectively make or sell about 30 percent of the country's plastic packaging, they have some leverage they hope can start to move the market.

"Our hope is that it's not just for the partners in the Canada Plastics Pact but that it's going to help send a signal broadly to the industry, to other brands, to recyclers and waste management companies, to converters, that here's where things are going," said George Roter, CPP managing director.

The report offers a step-by-step timeline of what the pact plans to do to meet targets it announced in January.

One of its four key targets is to identify, by mid-2022, lists of "problematic" plastic packaging that its signatory companies will phase out by 2025, along with boosting recycled content and designing more recyclable packaging.

All told, there are more than 70 companies, organizations and governments who have signed on, including Unilever Canada; Nestlé Canada; the country's largest plastics maker, Nova Chemicals; and the federal agency Environment and Climate Change Canada.

"Our take-make-waste approach to plastics is no longer viable," Roter said. "Plastic packaging is a vital part of daily life; it is high-performing, lightweight and low cost. But currently, over 85 percent of what we produce in Canada each year gets used once and ends up in landfills or the environment."

The report called for attention on flexible packaging, noting that the pact will "urgently galvanize" partners and others "to build a comprehensive plan for addressing the complex challenge of flexible plastic packaging."

It said it will develop that plan by the end of next year, noting that flexible packaging makes up 47 percent of the 1.89 million metric tons of plastic packaging Canadians use each year, but that only 1 percent is recycled.

Rigids make up the other 53 percent.

Roter called flexible packaging "incredibly valuable materials" that reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions from food spoilage. But he said the end-of-life challenges for the packaging are substantial.

"They're not getting collected, they're not getting recycled, it's hard to put recycled resin into them, not the least of the reasons because of health and safety regulations," Roter said.

The pact's report noted that the tight integration of the U.S. and Canadian economies calls for working closely with the U.S. Plastics Pact, which launched last year and released its own detailed road map in June.

The two pacts have very similar goals, with each calling for 100 percent of plastic packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 and for member companies to have 30 percent recycled content in plastic packaging by 2025.

Both also call for a 50 percent recycling or composting rate for plastic packaging in that same time frame.

"It's super ambitious and aggressive," Roter said. "But I think what that also reflects is the fact that you have so many of these different players who have significant energy and ideas and time to be able to really advance these goals."

He said the pact's members also will be doing significant work on models for reusable or refillable packaging, and he said there's a general recognition of the companies involved that the cost of packaging will have to increase to deal with end-of-life issues.

"I think for those who are part of the pact, there's an eyes wide open [sense] that many of these changes are going to result in some of the packaging costing more to the brands or the people producing them," Roter said.

The Canada road map opens with what it described as a "vision" for plastics use in 2035, where it says that 75 percent of the plastics used in packaging are recycled and where reusable and refillable packaging systems are "easy and ubiquitous."

Perhaps most importantly for makers of plastic packaging, it envisions a change in the economics of the industry.

"As a result, the overall amount of plastic packaging has not effectively grown since 2025, even as its value has increased," it said. "Recycled polymers are now both cost-competitive with virgin polymers and represent the preferred option."

Both the Canadian and U.S. pacts and others around the world are part of a network organized by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

In the United States, the U.S. pact's road map in June was met with criticism from the plastic resin industry.

The American Chemistry Council's plastics division said that while it supported the pact's goals, it opposed creating a list of "problematic" plastics packaging to phase out and faulted the U.S. pact for not including enough discussion about new chemical recycling technologies.

Leaders of the U.S. pact defended their choices, saying it's necessary to phase out packaging that lacks a clear, quick path to recyclability. And they said they don't see chemical recycling being deployed at scale fast enough to meet their 2025 targets.

In Canada, however, the reaction from the plastics industry has been more muted.

The head of the plastics division in the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, Elena Mantagaris, issued a statement that didn't directly criticize the CPP.

"Our members are focused on developing solutions to ensure that plastics do not end up as a waste, but remain in the economy," she said. "While we are not a signatory to the CPP, we are working toward a common goal: the establishment of a circular economy for plastics."

She said CIAC's plastics division wants to work on "systemwide recycling transformations" like extended producer responsibility plans and a zero plastic waste plan put forward by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment.

Roter said CIAC saw the road map before it was released, and the two sides have been in dialogue and have a "good relationship."

He said he thinks the plastics industry "doesn't love" the idea of identifying problematic plastics but sees it as part of a bigger picture.

"They, I think, have seen that our approach to a lot of these conversations is really open and pragmatic," Roter said. "We've engaged them on the development of this road map."

The Canadian pact is operating in a very different political environment than its U.S. counterpart, and Roter noted it may have some advantages in infrastructure financing and recycled content laws.

Most Canadian provinces, covering about 80 percent of the country's population, are moving ahead with plans to cover plastics and other packaging under extended producer responsibility systems in the next few years, he said.

In the U.S., by contrast, only two smaller states, Maine and Oregon, have passed plastics EPR laws. And Ottawa has moved faster at the national level on plastic waste than Washington.

EPR systems in general require packaging producers to pay more of the cost of recycling systems and are seen as a way to increase recycling rates and encourage companies to choose more environmentally friendly packaging.

In Canada, Roter said the push for EPR has led to very specific discussions in the organizations running the programs about what they should do in challenging areas like recycling flexible packaging.

"They're really interested in, for something like flexibles, what is the specific technology that we need to be putting into our procurement contracts and commissioning over the next two and a half years in order to reach some very aggressive flexibles recycling targets that are in the EPR regulation," he said.

"It really provides an opportunity for technology innovation and a lot of opportunity to shape what really gets built out in Canada from an infrastructure point of view," Roter said.

He also said the Canadian government is working on national recycled-content laws, and he noted that the agency tasked with developing them, Environment and Climate Change Canada, is part of the plastics pact.

"So they're watching what's happening in the pact and participating in that and using that to help inform [the question of] 'What does intelligently designed regulation look like,'" Roter said. "That helps drive interesting change."