Unpacking the circular economy for plastic

Plas­tic is one of the most maligned yet mirac­u­lous­ly light­weight mate­ri­als on the plan­et. The envi­ron­men­tal costs of dis­pos­ing of it improp­er­ly have right­ly been high­light­ed in recent years. But with­out it, it would be hard to keep food fresh or trans­port liq­uids home from the shops. 

It’s a tricky prob­lem to solve. There is a solu­tion, how­ev­er: a closed loop cir­cu­lar econ­o­my for plas­tics.

Instead of treat­ing plas­tic as waste, the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my treats it as a valu­able resource that can be end­less­ly recov­ered, recy­cled and remade into new prod­ucts – and not just of the same kind. Poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (PET) bot­tles, for exam­ple, can be turned into any­thing from fur­ni­ture to car­pets. But a lot of work still needs to be done to scale up the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and ensure that plas­tic no longer pol­lutes the envi­ron­ment.

Avery Den­ni­son, a For­tune 500 glob­al mate­r­i­al sci­ence com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in labelling, tapes, adhe­sives, graph­ics, reflec­tives, tags, RFID and dig­i­tal solu­tions, is meet­ing this chal­lenge head-on. It is com­mit­ted to scal­ing mate­ri­als that improve the recy­cla­bil­i­ty of con­sumer goods, increas­ing the amount of recy­cled con­tent used in its prod­ucts, and build­ing a glob­al sys­tem for recy­cling used labelling and pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als. 

The company’s efforts span three key phas­es of the plas­tics life­cy­cle: design, prod­uct life and after­life. And each of them plays a major role in dri­ving the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my for this vital but under­val­ued mate­r­i­al.

Design

Avery Dennison’s labels can be found on mil­lions of sham­poo bot­tles, food con­tain­ers, box­es and bags. And while these labels may only account for a small pro­por­tion of plas­tic pack­ag­ing, they make a big dif­fer­ence to how easy it is to recy­cle.

For exam­ple, using adhe­sives spe­cial­ly for­mu­lat­ed for the recy­cling process enables the prop­er recy­cling of mil­lions of food-grade PET pack­ages every year [See ‘Sus­tain­able labels for a float­ing farm’]. The infor­ma­tion on the label – three green arrows in a tri­an­gle, or num­bers and let­ters that help recy­cling teams to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als – also ensures that items are recy­cled prop­er­ly. Labels with a high lev­el of recy­cled con­tent, such as Avery Dennison’s rRange, can make items more sus­tain­able and cir­cu­lar too.

How­ev­er, there’s often a dis­con­nect between stake­hold­ers in the sup­ply chain. Design­ers and brand own­ers, for exam­ple, might want to use a yel­low, green or fuch­sia plas­tic to max­imise a product’s shelf appeal. But this deci­sion could make the item hard­er to recy­cle, poten­tial­ly adding to recy­clers’ costs and reduc­ing their yields.

If you look at recy­cla­bil­i­ty, it’s a func­tion of two fac­tors. One is the solu­tions and sys­tems for recy­cling. The sec­ond is con­sumer edu­ca­tion

“What’s good for the eyes or mar­ket­ing might not always be use­ful for recy­cling,” says Flor Peña Her­ron, sus­tain­abil­i­ty project man­ag­er at Avery Den­ni­son, “so we also need to design accord­ing to the whole life­cy­cle of the prod­uct.”

Avery Den­ni­son has devel­oped eco-design guide­lines to help brands address this issue. Peña Her­ron believes it’s also vital that com­pa­nies talk to their peers, sup­pli­ers and cus­tomers to find out where more recy­cled mate­ri­als could be used and how con­sumer atti­tudes are chang­ing. 

Take PET bot­tles, for instance. Although it may take time for con­sumers to adapt to the idea of ‘dif­fer­ent look’ recy­cled bot­tles that don’t come in the range of shades avail­able today, she says, as with recy­cled paper, qual­i­ty and cus­tomer adop­tion will con­tin­ue to improve. “Those dif­fer­ent looks might dis­ap­pear, or maybe the pub­lic will sim­ply accept them.”

But chang­ing opin­ions on shelf appeal and recy­cla­bil­i­ty is only part of the solu­tion to the plas­tic conun­drum; you also need to help con­sumers engage with recy­cling.

Product life

Design­ing for recy­cla­bil­i­ty is impor­tant, but so is what hap­pens to the prod­uct once con­sumers used it. “There’s a huge effort need­ed on aware­ness,” says Has­san Rmaile, vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of label and graph­ic mate­ri­als for EMENA.

He adds: “So, if you look at recy­cla­bil­i­ty, it’s a func­tion of two fac­tors. One is the solu­tions and sys­tems for recy­cling. The sec­ond is con­sumer edu­ca­tion. So, even if the label is ful­ly recy­clable and the plas­tic is ful­ly recy­clable, if con­sumers put every­thing in one trash bag – mix­ing plas­tic with glass or paper – you need to put in a lot of effort on the col­lec­tion side to sep­a­rate every­thing mechan­i­cal­ly. So for me, the oth­er fac­tor, con­sumer edu­ca­tion, is a very impor­tant one.”

Many peo­ple aren’t aware that dif­fer­ent types of plas­tic need to be sort­ed prop­er­ly dur­ing the recy­cling process. Labels can help to inform con­sumers what kind of plas­tic they’re deal­ing with, and whether it can be recy­cled or not. How­ev­er, some pack­ag­ing fea­tures more than one mate­r­i­al, or both rigid and flex­i­ble plas­tic, which is hard­er to recy­cle effi­cient­ly.

Avery Den­ni­son believes mono-mate­r­i­al pack­ag­ing can help to solve this issue. For instance, it recent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in a project that sought to remove the rigid plas­tic mouth found on pack­ets of baby wipes. “If you look at the more recent pack­ets, it’s now a flex­i­ble ‘tongue’ of plas­tic. It has a medi­um-strength adhe­sive so it sticks enough to close, but it’s not too strong to resist open­ing,” says Rmaile.

Ensur­ing that labels are like for like with the item they are attached to – plas­tic for plas­tic, paper for paper – also means recy­clers don’t need to wor­ry about sep­a­rat­ing them. “But the chal­lenge with the label is that it’s not just the face, it’s the adhe­sive too,” says Rmaile. “So, when you say mono­ma­te­r­i­al, it’s a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed than it sounds. The label needs to have the same mate­r­i­al as the bot­tle, and then the adhe­sive that’s glu­ing the face of that label to the bot­tle also needs to match as well.”

Afterlife

Once plas­tic leaves a consumer’s home or a business’s premis­es, it is sort­ed and sep­a­rat­ed from oth­er recy­clable mate­ri­als before being baled and trans­port­ed to spe­cial­ist plas­tics recov­ery facil­i­ties. Dif­fer­ent types of plas­tic such as PET, high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (HDPE – the kind used for milk or deter­gent con­tain­ers) or polypropy­lene (PP); dif­fer­ent coloured plas­tics; or the rigid or flex­i­ble kind all require dif­fer­ent recy­cling process­es,
so mixed bales require fur­ther sort­ing once they reach the plas­tic
recov­ery facil­i­ty. 

The plas­tic also needs to be cleaned to remove any con­t­a­m­i­nants that might affect the qual­i­ty of the recy­cled mate­r­i­al. Once the plas­tic is ground down into flakes, it is washed and sort­ed again, ready to be melt­ed down and made into new prod­ucts. But none of this is pos­si­ble with­out good plas­tic col­lec­tion schemes.

“Even if you have a brand new recy­cling facil­i­ty, if plas­tic isn’t col­lect­ed prop­er­ly you won’t have any feed­stock,” says Burak Sah­baz, senior direc­tor of mar­ket­ing and sus­tain­abil­i­ty at Avery Den­ni­son. The matu­ri­ty of these col­lec­tion pro­grammes tends to vary from coun­try to coun­try, and even munic­i­pal­i­ty to munic­i­pal­i­ty. “Some coun­tries are a lit­tle more advanced, while some are still in the ear­ly or inter­me­di­ate phas­es,” says Sah­baz. “But every­thing needs to go hand-in-hand.”

He notes that real-world sus­tain­abil­i­ty should always be at the fore­front of any recy­cling scheme. “Imag­ine that you have a good recy­cler on one side of Europe, and you’re col­lect­ing plas­tic at the oth­er side,” he says. “Trans­port­ing those prod­ucts to that site might not be sus­tain­able in terms of CO2 emis­sions.”

Respon­si­bil­i­ty for reusing and recy­cling plas­tic ulti­mate­ly lies with every­one in the val­ue chain, which is why Avery Den­ni­son is an active mem­ber of sev­er­al indus­try con­sor­tiums – includ­ing the Cir­cu­lar Econ­o­my for Labels (CELAB), which is ded­i­cat­ed to elim­i­nat­ing label waste. “Col­lab­o­ra­tion is the key to suc­cess,” says Sah­baz. “One com­pa­ny alone can cre­ate a spark, but real change comes from soci­ety, com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments all work­ing togeth­er.” 

Case Studies

Sus­tain­able labels for a float­ing farm

As the name sug­gests, Float­ing Farm is a lit­er­al float­ing dairy farm in Rot­ter­dam, Nether­lands. This inno­v­a­tive com­pa­ny want­ed its pack­ag­ing to align with its ambi­tious goals for urban food pro­duc­tion, ani­mal wel­fare and the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. But stan­dard poly­eth­yl­ene (PE) labels weren’t remov­able from their con­tain­ers, which lim­it­ed the recy­cla­bil­i­ty of the pack­age and sus­tain­abil­i­ty of their fin­ished prod­uct. 

To solve the prob­lem, Float­ing Farm turned to Avery Dennison’s Clean­Flake label solu­tion. Clean­Flake tech­nol­o­gy fea­tures a switch­able adhe­sive that sticks firm­ly dur­ing the package’s use but ‘turns off’ in the hot caus­tic bath that’s part of the recy­cling process. 

As a result, the label mate­r­i­al sep­a­rates from the PET flakes and floats clean­ly to the sur­face, leav­ing no label and adhe­sive residue in the PET stream. The PET flakes can then be processed into food-grade recy­cled PET, con­tribut­ing to a glob­al sup­ply that still lags behind demand.

Tack­ling the lin­er waste chal­lenge

Com­pa­nies in Europe con­sumed some 470 kilo­tons of label lin­ers in 2019, yet just over one-third were recy­cled. AD Cir­cu­lar, a new Avery Den­ni­son pro­gram for recy­cling used paper and filmic label lin­ers in coun­tries across Europe, aims to change that. 

Any com­pa­ny with label lin­ers can sign up for the ser­vice and arrange a time for the col­lec­tion of the lin­ers through a sim­ple dig­i­tal web-based app. Avery Den­ni­son then works with its part­ners to col­lect them and ensure they’re prop­er­ly recy­cled. It hopes that by 2025, 75% of the label waste it brings to the Euro­pean mar­ket will be recy­cled in this way.

“Our goal is to cre­ate a cir­cu­lar econ­o­my that works for every­body,” says Has­san Rmaile, vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of label and graph­ic mate­ri­als for EMENA. “So even if you’re using oth­er pro­duc­ers’ mate­ri­als, we’ll col­lect their lin­er and ensure it’s recy­cled prop­er­ly.” 

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it label.averydennison.com

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Pro­mot­ed by Avery Den­ni­son