Will millennial leadership in the plastics industry bring sustainable change?

As a millennial, I've known I live in a plastic-polluted world with a changing climate for most of my life. After reporting on the plastics industry while living through the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years, it's clear to me that human problems, like pollution and climate change, directly impact business. So why aren't plastics manufacturers making sustainability their first priority?

Plastics companies worked tirelessly during the pandemic to help their communities through that crisis, sometimes even donating products to the issue that we all collectively faced.

The incentive to get moving on sustainability is clear to many plastics industry millennials who recognize that business can be affected by these human issues, too.

"There's a generation wanting to create business in a different way," Patricia Miller, owner and CEO of Woodstock, Ill.-based injection molder M4 Factory and a fellow millennial, told me in an interview.

"Small to midsize manufacturing is often generationally owned," Miller said. "A lot of people coming into that next generation of ownership, they might have the title, but they don't have final decision-making authority."

Because Miller didn't grow up in the business, she said, she doesn't "have those same pressures or challenges that I see for a lot of my peers who still have their dad owning the business and in there making day-to-day decisions."

The current age range of the average plastics firm's workforce is "concerning," she said.

"As that old guard transitions out, there will be much more oxygen for [a new generation of leaders] to be able to make lasting decisions," Miller said. "As a business owner, you have to think about profitability and how you make sure the business can stay alive."

M4 has a workforce makeup of about 16 percent Gen Z, 42 percent millennial, 36 percent Gen X and 6 percent baby boomer.

"We want all of the generational representation because there's a lot of experience and tribal knowledge that needs to move from one generation to the next," she said. "We're very much an anomaly. … You have to be a forward thinker and have that energetic desire of being in a growth-oriented organization."

Another millennial leader in plastics, Tim Ponrathnam, sustainability director at Evansville, Ind.-based Berry Global, started a mentoring program called Spark in 2018 to help young professionals improve skills and grow within the company. The program unfortunately was stopped in 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic, but a few people who were a part of that program did end up getting promotions at Berry, Ponrathnam said.

An obvious roadblock to the industry taking more action and responsibility regarding plastic waste and greenhouse gas emissions is profitability. As long as the people making decisions for companies can't see the dividends of overhauling practice to be genuinely sustainable, it's not going to happen on a level that actually fixes the problem.

Making hard decisions to "keep the lights on" is a "constant challenge," Miller said.

Manufacturing "is complex and difficult with a lot of moving pieces for margins," she said. "I look at sustainability, not just in terms of material but of business sustainability. I'm very confident we can make the right choices and still have viable businesses."

Overall, she said, companies still aren't choosing sustainable practices over their profit margin: "They're still making cost-driven-only decisions. We have to bridge the gap."

I'm curious how long executives can carry on placing the responsibility on consumers and the public in the face of reports that the industry must take action in order to fix its continued PR problem.

Consumer awareness does put pressure on retail outlets and OEMs to require sustainable initiatives from partners, she said, but that is just one factor in the industry's waste problem.

While most organizations are starting to keep track of sustainable efforts and meet metric goals, Miller said, they will need to be "expected to hit those metrics," or they will continue to fall short. M4 is a part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which "has aggressive targets to reduce virgin plastic by 50 percent and move to a circular economy by 2025."

"We are in the pursuit of better, not perfect, while whole heartedly focusing on pushing to achieve these goals," she said.

"The more the world around us changes," Miller said, policy and regulatory bodies will "continue to push for having less virgin materials and thinking more circularly. … I think regulations have to play a role in things."

The industry's "PR problem," Ponrathnam said, is "primarily driven by [product] end-of-life concerns."

Berry, also taking part in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation goals, hopes to reduce its carbon emissions by 25 percent and make all of its products recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025, he said. It is also recycling in-house in its European facilities. The company is currently at 82 percent of that goal, Ponrathnam said.

"We've identified what product lines need to be updated to make sure they fall in compliance," he said. "We have active programs in place to address the challenges for recyclability.

"I think what we need to do more about as an industry … is to help support [recovery efforts]" of plastic for recycling, Ponrathnam said. "The challenge in recycling is both collection and sortation."

The carbon emission savings of replacing virgin plastics with mechanically recycled plastics are "significant," he said, with a potential 33-66 percent footprint reduction.

"Recycling is necessary because it allows us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for making polymers," Ponrathnam said. "It provides demand for polymers at their end of life and ultimately reduce the amount of plastics that get littered because the materials are valuable and are needed for applications."

In order to get companies involved in waste and recycling initiatives, manufacturers should make themselves a part of the conversation in their communities, Miller said. "How are we pushing for more recycled goods even within our own town? What are our waste streams, and do we have vendor partners? How can we make sure anything that can be deemed waste is upcycled?" she said. "We can still get to where we need to go with some concessions."

How can voters and consumers see the need for more regulation and personal effort if they believe the industry is already doing its part? For instance, if a business uses sustainable packaging, it doesn't mean the business itself is sustainable in all its practices, but it makes the consumer feel better about their purchase anyway.

"There's a lot of marketing campaigns that are suggestive that companies are moving in that direction," Miller said. "In totality, it's still a very minimal amount of plastic products that are being created sustainably. The majority of the supply chain is still pumping out virgin plastic."

In an industry that is fearful of change, Miller said, she sees sustainable practices as an eventuality for the plastics industry, though it isn't happening quickly.

"We're all in this together, and there isn't a clear-cut path beyond the overall objective of getting to a circular economy," she said.

When Miller set out to build her business sustainably, she didn't find a "readily prepared supply chain," she said. "It's still very fragmented."

"I'm very curious what the supply chain leaders are doing to get behind this as a priority and what that will mean to allow manufacturers to make these decisions more easily or accessible," she added.

Sarah Kominek is a Detroit-based Plastics News staff reporter and author of the Fake Plastic Trees blog. Follow her on Twitter @SarahKominek.