US plastic bottle recycling flat: Sign of resilience or failure on road to sustainability?

Washington — The U.S. plastic bottle recycling rate held steady at 29 percent in 2018, and depending on who you listen to, that was either evidence of industry strength in a tough business or that bottle recycling was falling flat in its attempts to become more sustainable.

Two industry trade groups released the 2018 report on Dec. 18 and argued that while the rate and pounds collected were essentially unchanged, there were positive trends. They pointed to continued expansion of domestic U.S. bottle recycling and growing demand for recycled content plastic because of commitments from large consumer product companies.

"Plastics recycling is a vibrant, resilient industry that continues to remain strong in a challenging environment," said Steve Alexander, president of the Association of Plastic Recyclers in Washington, one of the groups that put out the report.

"Despite the reduction in export markets, demand for quality recycled material remains robust, and many recyclers are investing in updating and expanding our domestic infrastructure to meet that demand," he said.

But the environmental perspective was different, with stagnant or falling recycling rates meaning that the industry is not making measurable progress.

The head of the Container Recycling Institute said increasing use of plastics in bottles and falling recycling rates in recent years mean that the U.S. is increasing the amount of plastic bottle waste it sends to landfills and incinerators.

Culver City, Calif.-based CRI estimated that the U.S. trashed about 7.2 billion pounds of plastic bottles in 2018, compared with 5.5 billion pounds landfilled or incinerated in 2000.

"As a result of the increased production levels and the declining recycling rates, we are throwing away more and more plastic bottles each year," said CRI President Susan Collins. "Compared to the year 2000, we're creating 30 percent more plastic bottle waste." 

The report, from APR and the American Chemistry Council, said that the overall plastic bottle recycling rate fell to 28.9 percent in 2018, down slightly from 29.3 percent in 2017.

For PET bottles, which account for about 63 percent of all plastic bottle recycling, the rate was also 28.9 percent in 2018, down from 29.2 percent.

For high density polyethylene, which accounts for 35 percent of plastic bottle recycling, the rate in 2018 was 30.4 percent, down from 31.1 percent in 2017.

In the United States, 2.85 billion pounds of plastic bottles were collected for recycling in 2018, up from 2.8 billion pounds the year before. Collection of PET was up about 90 million pounds while HDPE dropped 40 million pounds.

The report said the U.S. continues to recycle more bottle waste domestically and export less, a long-term trend it said was pushed along by China's National Sword restrictions on imported plastic waste.

In 2018, about 9.9 percent of bottles were exported, down from more than 40 percent a decade ago and 20 percent in 2016.

Overall, the report said it was a tough environment for bottle recycling, with the industry not keeping pace with growth of plastic bottle packaging on store shelves and being hurt by low prices of virgin plastic.

"The post-consumer plastic bottle recycling industry experienced a third difficult year in 2018 with less growth in pounds collected than in pounds of bottles on store shelves," the report said.

As well, it said low prices for virgin materials made for a tougher economic situation for plastic recycling companies: "As a general matter, the cost of petroleum and petrochemicals favored the economic competitiveness of virgin plastics compared to post-consumer plastic." 

ACC and APR noted a number of barriers to bottle recycling.

The first cited in the report was lack of consumer awareness of the demand for and value of recycled plastic, and it suggested more municipal education campaigns around curbside programs and more opportunities to recycle bottles away from home.

The industry groups also said that efforts to ban single-use packaging are hurting.

"Campaigns to eliminate single-use packaging hurt plastic bottle recycling," the report said. "The campaigns tend to focus on litter, not proper solid waste management, and do not include a holistic life cycle approach to decision-making. In addition, food safety and hygiene afforded by plastic packaging are overlooked."

But environmental critics say the industry report appears to blame consumers for not recycling enough and ignores the higher PET bottle recycling rates from the 10 states that have bottle bills.

"The report summarizes 'barriers to increased plastic bottle recycling,' and says that the culprits are consumers, oil prices, lack of access to recycling, etc.," Collins said.

"However, we all know that we could have an 80 percent recycling rate for PET bottles if we passed a national container deposit law, rather than the less than 30 percent recycling rate that the U.S. has had for many years," she said.

"Consumers are generally very disappointed to hear how low the plastic bottle recycling rates are, how low the rates of recycled content are, and even more disappointed when they learn about the industries and companies that oppose the very legislation that would increase recycling rates and recycled content," Collins said.

The U.S. PET recycling rate does lag that for Europe, which had a PET bottle recycling rate of 58 percent in 2017, according to the Brussels-based industry group Petcore Europe. That group has a pledge to increase the PET collection rate in Europe to 90 percent by 2025.

U.S. industry officials, however, pointed to the commitments from consumer product brand companies to use more recycled plastic, as a driver for increasing recycling.

"Brand owners have made public commitments to use significantly more recycled content in their products and packages in the months ahead," said Steve Russell, vice president of ACC's plastics division. "And manufacturers across the value chain are creating more circular business models for using — and reusing — plastics. It is therefore increasingly important to get as much of the right plastics into the recycling bin as possible."

The PET container industry released its own 2018 recycling report a few days earlier, on Dec. 16, noting that the PET recycling rate held steady at around 30 percent for the last decade.

The head of the National Association for PET Container Resources said that without substantially higher PET bottle recycling rates, consumer product companies will not be able to get enough material to meet their recycled content commitments.

The U.S. curbside recycling system has a PET bottle recycling rate of about 21 percent, compared with 68 percent for bottle bill states and 73 percent for California's bottle bill system, according to an analysis by longtime PET recycling consultant David Cornell in the August issue of The Journal of Blow Molding.

Cornell's analysis said that California, with 12 percent of the U.S. population, accounted for 29 percent of PET bottles collected for recycling in 2017. It said that 55 percent of PET bottles collected nationally came from curbside systems.