Plastics treaty urged to include EPR for flexible packaging ‘to make it work'

Paris — The flexible packaging industry brought a nuanced message to the global plastics treaty talks.

Executives joined the recent United Nations negotiating session in Paris to urge countries to include extended producer responsibility programs in any agreement.

The idea is that companies should pay more — and do more — to deal with the economic challenges of recycling and managing hard-to-process plastic waste.

But they also had a second message for diplomats who will now begin drafting language for the treaty — consider the benefits of the increasingly popular thin-film plastic packaging they make.

"It's easy to bash things and flexible packaging takes its fair share of bashing," said Graham Houlder, managing director of the European flexible packaging organization Ceflex. "It's normally referred to as complicated multimaterial packaging which can't be recycled, which No. 1, is not true."

Houlder spoke during a May 29 interview in Paris on the opening day of a five-day negotiating session, where he and a Ceflex delegation were advocating for financial measures like EPR to be in the treaty.

Fees on companies responsible for putting the packaging on the market are crucial to helping to pay for recycling, Ceflex said.

"To make it work, you need EPR because it's not realistic to expect to collect, sort and recycle these materials without some form of subsidization," he said.

Ceflex, which includes 180 companies and organizations in the flexible packaging supply chain across Europe, made several points in a written submission to the United Nations ahead of the Paris meeting, which drew diplomats from 170 countries and more than 1,500 observers like Houlder.

It said the treaty should include binding global requirements that plastic packaging be designed for recycling, that recycling targets be set at the national level and that governments create "sustainably funded" systems so that recyclers can get consistent feedstock and stability to invest.

Legislation can ensure that all companies pay their share and those that spend money to green their packaging don't become less competitive against those that don't, said the group, whose full name is Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging.

"From a Ceflex perspective, having a globally harmonized set of design-for-circularity criteria and an obligation to implement them would help to create a situation where businesses that invest in design-for-circularity are not put at a competitive disadvantage," Houlder said.

He said the cost per package for flexibles EPR in Europe, in general, is much less than the price point difference between products on store shelves.

He said the system in Belgium, one of the most ambitious, is less than one euro cent for a package weighing 15 grams. That's about the weight of an empty aluminum can.

"You're talking about much less than a euro cent to collect, sort and recycle," he said. "And that's in the most expensive system today, which is probably also the most ambitious [in Belgium]."

Beyond EPR, he said chemical recycling will also be crucial.

"Mechanical recycling of polyethylene and polypropylene films, at this point in time, doesn't meet the food contact regulations in Europe or many other countries," Houlder said.

"The only string to our bow that we have at this point is chemical recycling," he said. "We are actively working to commercialize these technologies at scale because it's the only way that the big brand owners who are putting these materials onto the market in quantities can actually get access to recyclates at the right quality."

Beyond pushing for mandatory recycling provisions to green the industry's footprint, Ceflex said it wanted diplomats working on the treaty to consider the environmental and financial benefits of flexible packaging.

In its filing, it carried a message to diplomats against bans, saying that "consumer flexible packaging is necessary and not suitable for elimination and substitution."

The group told countries meeting at U.N. offices in the French capital, for example, that a lightweight plastic sauce packet on grocery shelves can have a carbon footprint 60 percent lower than glass jars or metal cans packaging the same product.

Houlder said the treaty's working documents thus far have said little about flexible packaging directly. But with the packaging format's large market share, countries likely will have to consider it.

Ceflex told negotiators that about half of the primary food packaging on the European Union market is in a flexible format, with plastic-based pouches and other designs accounting for about 80 percent of that.

"Significant volumes of flexible packaging will need to remain and be recycled in a circular economy," Ceflex wrote.

Negotiators plan three more sessions like Paris over the next 18 months, along with smaller meetings in between, to try to finish an agreement by late 2024.

Ceflex is also encouraging the treaty to consider design guidelines it unveiled in 2022 that focus on polyolefin flexible packaging — polyethylene and polypropylene — and call for redesigns to support mono-material packaging.

Houlder said Ceflex would like to see the treaty push global design criteria, so that materials fed into recycling systems are easier to turn back into new packaging.

"There should be no reason why we need to have different design guidelines in different parts of the world for essentially the same packaging, so it should be an easy win" he said.

Still, he acknowledged there's a lot of discussion even within Europe on harmonizing packaging design.

"The design guidelines show you what's possible, how to do it correctly and at the lowest cost, so adoption of those is absolutely key," he said.

Much of Ceflex's work is focused on Europe, where the group formed in 2017 to develop better recycling systems for flexibles.

But Houlder said the group was also at the treaty because there's no global flexible packaging organization to represent the industry on environmental issues at the U.N.-organized talks.

"We were asked to step up and share some of the knowledge we have gained over the last six years in terms of how we make these materials circular," he said.

In its filing, it included details on some industry-funded projects to try to collect and recycle flexible packaging in Ghana, India and Indonesia.

In the interview, Houlder said the treaty could speed up development of EPR in developing economies.

"The issue is that EPR systems aren't established to deliver circularity in [those] countries," he said. "That's what we would like to see happening as a result of the treaty. That's going to take some time.

"The thinking behind Ceflex's circularity model is that you have to give each piece of waste sufficient value so that there's a business opportunity in it for the actors who are going to collect, sort and recycle it," Houlder said.

He said similar thinking could apply to building recycling systems to handle sachets, the single-serve flexible packages that deliver smaller, cheaper servings of daily goods in developing countries but that are frequently criticized for their lack of recyclability.

You may be able to put deposits on sachets to encourage recycling, similar to bottle bills, Houlder said.

"It's the same principle," he said. "The sachets have to have enough money in the system somewhere so that people actually want to collect those.

"You could envisage a DRS scheme, a deposit return scheme," he said. "That still has to be thought through but ideally you need that. You need that level playing field, which is part of the legislation. And that's not yet there in many of these countries."