Packaging suppliers face winding pathway on the road to sustainability

Detroit — Plastics packaging suppliers have a lot of work ahead in order to coordinate sustainable systems across their value chains.

"Ultimately people [in the industry] are trying to solve both," the issue of plastic waste and the carbon footprint of the supply chain, David Clark, vice president of sustainability at Amcor Ltd., said at the at the Injection Molding & Design Expo in Detroit.

Flexible packaging is made with different types of resin, sometimes laminated together to create a high-performance product with "great barrier properties, strength and light weight," Clark said.

"But then it's pretty much worthless for recyclers. … Packaging is kind of the poster child for what's not very sustainable," he added.

Packaging suppliers are seeing demand from their customers to make packaging more sustainable, but each customer is at its own pace on the sustainability journey.

"They're all in different places right now," Clark said. "Even different people in the company have different ideas. If you talk to the sustainability person, they tend to have longer-term goals … and if you talk to the marketing person, they … want a quick win next week."

"It's a matter of educating [customers] on what will work and what won't work, and what's actually more sustainable," Clark said. "Sometimes these drives for quick wins lead people to bad conclusions."

"Quick wins" could appear in the form of changing plastic packaging to other materials such as paper, he said, "because consumers like paper."

But consumers can misunderstand what solutions are truly sustainable, Henrik Palokangas, application development and sustainability specialist at compounder Polykemi AB, said during the show.

"How do we communicate this to the end customer in an understandable way?" Palokangas said. "What might seem good in a marketing perspective might not be the best solution. So, how do we communicate this? I think the key is to be transparent within the supply chain so we actually know what we're doing and keeping it fact-based.

"We're attempting to simplify … a complex issue," he said.

"Consumers, the end users, are really looking to brand owners to address plastic waste and sustainable solutions," Diane Marret, sustainability manager consumer of consumer packaging North America at Berry Global Inc., said. "Those brand owners are coming back to suppliers like Berry and Amcor [for solutions].

"A lot of our time is spent educating the brand owners on what's possible, what's available now vs. long term and then address the supply chain issues that go into that," Marret said. "There are some [customers] looking for quick wins … looking to understand where [they can] participate now. Where [they] need to be if legislation is driving [them] to change what [they're] doing and what does [their] timeline have to be to meet that.

Most of the technologies and solutions that exist for large-scale sustainability "are still in development and not up to scale," she said.

"Designing for sustainability means a lot of different things for a lot of different industries," she added.

Amcor also works in materials outside of the plastics industry, Clark said.

Large mainstream suppliers in industries such as paper, metal and glass are already using a larger percentage of recycled materials and have road maps to meet zero-emissions goals by 2050, he said.

"Our plastics suppliers don't have that," Clark said. "That puts us at a disadvantage. Plastics is still the only industry that has these little artisanal recyclers making the recycled content we're trying to find.

"Most of our large global customers have signed up for science-based [programs] and made net-zero commitments," he said. "Our concern is when we ask our resin suppliers, 'How are you going to help us?' They don't have an answer for that."

Some of the bigger resin companies "are saying they're going to come on board … [at] some point in the future and they still don't really have robust plans," Clark added.

"There's more to sustainability than just going for recycling," Palokangas said. "That's one solution, but it's not always the best solution."

Palokangas spent the last few years analyzing Polykemi's operations, he said, adding that a huge issue in the move toward circularity in plastics is the lack of waste infrastructure.

"We need to have these material flows," he said. "It's a joint effort within the supply chain to provide the solutions we need."

In a systems-based approach, Clark said, "it's not going to be the designers and injection molders that solve this problem. We need to think more systematically about how our whole ecosystem works and make it a lot more sustainable in the future."

"By working with recyclers [rather than] designing this on our own … we [can] make something that's valuable for [recyclers] and meets the performance requirements of our customers," he said.

Designers also "get a lot more creative" when designing for circularity, Clark said.

Amcor has thousands of life cycle assessments on plastic packaging every year, Clark said, helping the company understand where the product is used, how it's disposed of, what recyclers would do with the product at end of life, "and how, eventually, we get it back."

Other important factors include the carbon footprint of the product and potential water and land use for bio-based plastics, he said.

"We know our own processes and we have developed internal tools so we know the footprint of the energy at each of our plants," Clark said. "We know the energy it takes to do each of our processes. It's not much more complicated than what you can do in an Excel spreadsheet.

"If you look at only carbon footprint, it looks like it's less impactful to make new products and bury them in a landfill because then you're sequestering them and you make a new one," he said. "But that's not solving the waste problem.

"The way we recycle, especially in the U.S., … [recycled material] doesn't run the same way; it doesn't look as good," Clark said. "There's a lot of variation in recycling streams. From season to season, you go down south and there are more green bottles … from one part of the year to another. [People] consume differently and the recycling stream changes color.

"You see that in the products that use recycled product," he said. "Some producers are better than others at filtering that and making it less impactful on manufacturing.

"We've had to learn to deal with different color considerations and we're trying to get brand owners to buy in on gray as the new thing," Marret said. "We want people to be OK with recycled material."

In the last year, Marret said she's hearing more urgency from brand owners that have goals in place. "But now legislation is really driving the activity.

"There's a lot of big brand owners putting goals out there and we're inching toward those goals, not fast enough," she said. "Legislation has been sitting out there churning. … We're starting to see some traction, whether it's recycled-content mandates or EPR legislation."

But "we're a ways off" from federal legislation in circularity, Marret added. "Legislation at this point is very fragmented. In some cases it's down to the county level. Who has time to keep track of all that? It's very difficult."

In Europe, Palokangas said, a lot of circularity is consumer-driven and legislation "isn't keeping up."

"We need to really pay attention to what the governments are doing," he said. "They are suboptimizing [issues] that resonate with their voter base, which might not be the best solution in a total perspective."

Mechanical recycling is here to stay for most plastic waste streams, Marret said. "It works well in most streams. Keep those streams as clean as you can. … In other scenarios [with] mixed materials or other contaminations," chemical recycling can be "complementary."

But mechanical recycling can't break down films made from a mix of materials, she said. That's where chemical and molecular recycling comes in.

"These are the opportunities to break materials down to a molecular level and create new virgin polymer from those fuels," Marret said.

"We're partnering with a lot of big material suppliers to help build this value chain," she said. "There [are] a lot of pieces in the value chain that are immature and need time to further develop. We do see a path to get this scaled up."

"This has started too late and [chemical recyclers have] made big commitments," Clark said. "If you look at what's actually happening today, it's not a lot. There are some materials being put into the market for trials. But we use 100,000 tons of recycled material and all but about 20 [tons] of that is mechanically recycled because you just can't get more chemically recycled material.

"The plants aren't built; the technology is still being developed in many cases," he said. "I think we need to be really careful about setting expectations in how this is going to ramp up. We're very optimistic because it has great potential to solve a lot of problems, but we can't just relax and assume chemical recycling over the next five to 10 years is going to automatically scale."

"We need to look at chemical recycling as the last stage because we can use the material in mechanical recycling several times before [using] chemical recycling," Palokangas said. "Because it is very energy-intensive and the carbon footprint and environmental impact is tremendous.

"We need to be very careful when selecting the [mechanically recycled] source for an application," he added. "That way it doesn't have to be reversed to a virgin material. It can perform on the same level. … Propertywise, it's possible to meet the specification of virgin materials with the right tolerance windows necessary for stable production.

"But [chemical recycling is] a useful resource," Palokangas said. "There's nothing that contradicts material starting out as food packaging, ending up in the center console of a car, becoming a flowerpot and then being chemical recycled into new food packaging."