Getting back a desired ‘widely recyclable' label for polypropylene

An industry coalition working to turn around falling access to polypropylene packaging recycling in curbside programs believes its early investments are paying off and it's making "meaningful progress" toward its goals.

But a group that will assess one of those key goals — the ability to label PP packaging like yogurt cups, margarine tubs and Keurig coffee pods as "widely recyclable" in the United States — cautions that measuring progress is complex.

The Polypropylene Recycling Coalition formed last year with $35 million from major consumer brands and plastics firms to funnel grants to local materials recovery facilities to get more Americans access to recycling PP.

The impetus was a decision by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition in early 2020 to downgrade the ranking of polypropylene in its popular How2Recycle labeling system, meaning PP could no longer be marketed as "widely recyclable" because of shortcomings in the market.

Instead, PP packages have to be labeled "check locally," a significant change for companies under pressure from consumers to use easily recyclable packaging.

In comments at the online Plastics Recycling Conference in April, a leader of the PP recycling group said she sees a pathway to getting back the "widely recyclable" status, which includes having 60 percent of the U.S. population with access to recycling of the material, under federal government guidelines.

"What we do believe is that polypropylene itself is very close to that 60 percent access," said Sarah Dearman, vice president of circular ventures for The Recycling Partnership, which is coordinating the recycling coalition.

"We've largely zeroed in on that and are making meaningful progress," Dearman said. "We believe we are making the progress that's needed to get back over that threshold in the very near future."

In a March 31 news release, the PP coalition announced a new round of grants that will bring its total funding to $3 million for upgrading materials recycling facilities to better sort PP and expand recycling education.

It said that will bring PP recycling access to 7.2 million more people in the U.S., or an additional 3 percent of U.S. households.

"We are laser focused on getting that widely recycled status back, though we're definitely not going to stop there," she said.

The coalition will continue working on increasing PP recycling, she said, noting that many of its members are looking at more ambitious recycling goals, like getting PP packaging to a 30 percent recycling rate target called for by groups like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in its New Plastics Economy project.

PP containers and packaging in the U.S. are nowhere near that, however: They had a recycling rate of only 2.7 percent in 2018, the last year figures are available, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.

"Getting the access is not going to be enough," Dearman said. "As we work toward 60 percent access, we're also aiming of course to increase that recycling rate and we'll have a lot more work to do there."

But even getting access to 60 percent of city recycling programs collecting it may not be enough on its own to get back the "widely recyclable" label, according to Nina Goodrich, executive director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.

PP packaging has problems beyond access that were part of SPC's decision to downgrade it, she said. That includes questions around whether MRFs were selling or landfilling PP sorted from the recycling stream.

She said SPC uses Federal Trade Commission guidelines for its How2Recycle label, with 60 percent access being only one of four criteria.

"The issue last year was that we had to downgrade polypropylene because the access had dropped," she said. "And there was this uncertainty around how many communities were actually sorting the polypropylene out and selling it on to an end market.

"There was enough uncertainty around that, in terms of how big that number could be, that we downgraded polypropylene because the FTC says when there's uncertainty, you have to use a qualified claim," Goodrich said. "So the issue wasn't access alone."

It's not clear exactly how close PP packaging is to that 60 percent access figure.

Goodrich said SPC did not publicly release a specific percentage when it downgraded PP but was seeing access for PP drop as cities limited the plastics they would collect, partly in response to China's 2018 National Sword ban on plastic scrap imports from the U.S. and other countries.

Local governments increasingly started limiting their collection to PET and high density polyethylene, she said.

"The trajectory was down for the access rate," she said. "The reason for that is communities are starting to restrict what they take."

Goodrich said SPC plans to release a new study on access rates midyear but stressed that even if PP climbs above 60 percent of communities accepting it in recycling bins, there could still be questions around whether enough MRFs are successfully sorting PP they receive from local programs.

"We'll know where the access rate is, but that doesn't necessarily mean that polypropylene would move back to widely recycled because there's still so much uncertainty around what's happening at the MRF level," Goodrich said.

Similarly, another SPC staffer, Adam Gendell, said at the coalition's SPC Impact conference in April that based on the latest data, it did not seem that PP was poised to regain the widely recyclable status "in the near term."

In a statement, the Recycling Partnership pointed to SPC data that "approximately" 60 percent of U.S. communities accept PP packaging, and said it would work with SPC to evaluate how the 3 percent increase in access it estimates fits into the 2021 SPC data.

Some research, however, has noted lower levels of acceptance of PP packaging in recycling streams.

A February 2020 Greenpeace study found that only 53 percent of the U.S. MRFs accepted PP packaging, compared with 100 percent that accepted PET. And the report said only 31 percent of the U.S. population had access to local recycling programs that collected PP tubs and containers.

PP recycling is attracting attention because it's a favored material in packaging and some involved in the PP recycling coalition have a long-term goal to turn it into the third leg of a stool for plastic packaging recycling, joining PET and high density polyethylene.

Those materials, however, have recycling rates that are significantly higher: PET and HDPE bottles each have rates close to 30 percent. Still, companies using PP see opportunities.

Keurig Dr Pepper Inc., a founding member of the PP Recycling Coalition with a $10 million investment, switched its K-Cup pods for Keurig coffee machines to polypropylene last year because the material met performance requirements and is recyclable, said Monique Oxender, the company's chief sustainability officer.

In an online presentation at the Plastics Recycling Conference, she said the PP recycling coalition members are investing in using recycled materials, both in food-grade packaging and in other applications that could boost the PP market in the short term while food-grade work develops.

Oxender believes PP recycling could develop faster than it took for PET and HDPE recycling.

"There is a really interesting moment where things are accelerating," she said. "It's not going to take that same period of time it took PET or HDPE to connect the pieces of the value chain and really address all of these points."

Recycling of polypropylene, which is No. 5 in the resin identification code, has suffered as communities have stopped collecting plastics Nos. 3-7 in the wake of China's National Sword import restrictions, said Rich Simon, director of MRF advancement for the Recycling Partnership.

But at the same time, there's increasing demand for recycled PP in the United States, he said.

In the wake of China's restrictions in 2018, MRFs put a lot of focus on recycled paper, since it's 50 percent of their materials stream, and as a result "backburnered" plastics grades 3-7, including PP, said Simon, who spoke in a presentation at the online SPC Impact conference in late April.

But that's changing, and the PP recycling coalition believes it can make gains with polypropylene in the U.S. waste stream.

"I think we see this as an opportunity to change that [for PP] and some factors are aligning that may allow for that," he said.