Jean-Loup Masson, Director of Circular Solutions Center at The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, discusses the Alliance’s latest report on flexible plastic waste management.
To address the growing problem of soft plastic waste, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste has released a new report titled “Soft Plastic Packaging Waste Challenges and Solutions”. By taking a holistic view to the management of flexible film waste, this report assesses the current situation and the interventions required, outlines the Alliance’s proactive approach to combating this issue, and features specific projects being implemented in the UK and across Europe.
To discuss the challenges of flexible plastic waste and provide insight into the report, The Innovation Platform spoke to Jean-Loup Masson, Director of the Circular Solutions Center at The Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
What is flexible plastic and what are the key challenges that need to be addressed regarding waste?
Flexible plastics are lightweight, versatile materials that have become an essential part of everyday life. They are relatively low cost, have a low carbon footprint, and are excellent at extending food shelf life, protecting goods in transit, and providing consumers with highly convenient packaging options. Walk into a kitchen, warehouse, or supermarket and chances are there’s flexible plastic within arm’s reach. It includes a variety of packaging designs such as films, wraps, pouches, sachets, and labels.
However, most flexible plastics are currently disposed of in landfills, incinerated, or leaked into the environment. The same benefits that make soft plastics useful also lead to significant challenges in managing soft plastic waste. Considering that flexible plastics account for more than half of the total plastic packaging market, this challenge needs to be addressed.
The central challenge lies in classifying and separating design diversity and complexity. Unlike many rigid plastics, flexible packaging is often composed of multiple, sometimes incompatible, polymers combined with adhesives, inks, and barrier layers. While this complexity enables superior performance, it also makes it difficult to effectively fractionate and separate flexible plastics using existing technologies.
Inconsistent and low-quality raw materials make it difficult to mechanically recycle flexible plastics into high-value applications. Chemical recycling can provide higher quality materials, but remains constrained by cost barriers and regulatory uncertainty.
Finally, the lower cost of virgin plastics compared to recycled flexible plastics continues to limit investment in recycling capacity.
Can you summarize the key takeaways from the Flexibles Insight report and explain the methodology used to create the report?
This report identifies five key drivers for achieving circularity in flexible plastic packaging and highlights that progress requires concerted action across the value chain.
First, it is important to improve collection and separation through separate collection of waste and secondary separation with high particle size. This report focuses on the role of municipal Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs), complemented by the more sophisticated ‘secondary sorting’ of Plastics Recovery Facilities (PRFs). These facilities can better implement advanced detection technologies such as digital watermarking and artificial intelligence (AI)-based recognition to improve raw material quality and material homogeneity.
Enabling end-market demand for recycled materials is also important. If there is no high-value use for the recycled material, it is not worth the investment. Policy mechanisms such as extended producer responsibility schemes and mandating consumer recycled content targets, along with other financial interventions, can help create demand and improve competitiveness for virgin plastics.
Additionally, attracting and retaining capital for infrastructure and technology requires risk-averse investments. Stable and predictable policy frameworks and financial instruments such as corporate tax cuts, land use, energy and labor subsidies, and concessional financing can help attract and retain the capital needed for infrastructure development. Regulatory clarity, especially regarding chemical recycling, is essential to maintain investor confidence.
The report also highlights the importance of harmonized recyclable design guidelines to reduce packaging complexity and recycling barriers, along with environmentally tailored EPR rates to encourage the adoption of simpler packaging designs.
These insights are directly based on the Alliance’s on-the-ground experience working on projects in Europe and North America as part of our Flexible Theme Program.
How can advanced technology be used to enhance the recycling process? What potential benefits could advanced sorting techniques bring to the recycling of flexible plastics?
Advanced technologies are poised to significantly enhance the recycling of flexible plastics by addressing the limitations of current separation methods. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has long been an industry standard, but rather than quantification, it can only detect the presence of various polymers and additives and cannot identify packaging type or access product-level data.
This is where digital watermarking and AI-based recognition offer transformative potential. Digital watermarking involves embedding an invisible code directly into the packaging, which can be detected by specialized scanners at sorting facilities. This enables highly accurate identification of packages and access to detailed product information via linked databases, improving sorting accuracy and recycling quality.
Demonstrations conducted in late 2023 and early 2024 as part of the HolyGrail 2.0 initiative showed that digital watermarking can reliably identify and separate flexible plastics, even when the materials are old, peeling, or heavily contaminated. A detection rate of 95% and a screening rate of 85% were achieved in the first pass. The focus is now on real-world trials of the technology in Belgium and Germany to see if it is ready for commercialization.
AI-based recognition complements digital watermarking by using advanced computer vision and machine learning to identify packages based on visible features such as shape, color, and brand logos. This approach is particularly effective for complex or contaminated waste streams and can be integrated into existing infrastructure, making it less costly and easier to implement for recyclers.
These technologies work together as a powerful combination. AI-based recognition enhances the ability of sorting systems to interpret complex waste streams, and digital watermarks allow information about the packaging itself to be embedded.
The report points to the potential to de-risk investments to support plastic waste management. How can this be achieved?
Governments have a key role to play in reducing the risks of investing in recycling infrastructure through stable and effective policy frameworks. For example, regulatory clarity is essential for emerging technologies such as chemical recycling, which is a key part of the solution to flexible plastic waste. Questions about mass balance attribution, recycled content claims, and overall legitimacy increase investment risk. Clear and consistent rules on how chemical recycling production counts towards recycling targets would greatly improve the investment case and remove a major barrier to scale-up.
Direct financial incentives also play an important role. By offering lower energy prices and direct labor subsidies to recyclers, governments can reduce operating costs and improve profit margins, creating a more compelling proposition for investors. Germany has pursued this strategy, for example by providing energy subsidies to reduce the burden of high energy costs in recycling operations.
Governments can further de-risk investments through concessional loans that offer below-market interest rates and favorable repayment terms. This reduces capital costs, makes marginal projects viable, and shortens implementation schedules.
Reducing corporate taxes is another effective measure. Lowering the percentage of profits claimed by the government improves cash flow for investors and shortens the payback period. This is a particularly important factor for infrastructure projects with long development cycles and slow construction returns.
Ultimately, recycling business models must be economically sustainable and able to meet end market demands. Risk avoidance focuses on promoting projects that demonstrate feasibility and meet market requirements.
The report also identifies end market demand needs. Can you explain why this demand is important to the field and how schemes such as EPR and PCR materials are beneficial? What are effective ways to manage and implement these schemes?
End market demand is the driving force that makes the entire recycling system work. Simply put, if there is no high-value use for recycled materials, there is no reason to invest in the infrastructure required to collect, sort, and recycle flexible plastic packaging.
This is where targeting consumer recycled (PCR) content becomes essential. Addressing PCR content is one of the most effective ways to stimulate demand by requiring brands to incorporate recycled content into their packaging, providing a more reliable market for recyclers.
Blanket PCR targets must be handled carefully to be implemented effectively, as the technical challenges vary widely for each application. While some packaging types can easily incorporate recycled content, others, such as food contact films, face even greater constraints. Therefore, differentiated targets may be required, such as distinguishing between film and rigid packaging.
How you apply your goals is also important. If companies are required to meet certain targets at the individual product level rather than on average across the portfolio, this does not incentivize the use of recyclables in products where a lower content ratio is technically possible, nor does it reward them for exceeding targets where higher content rates are possible. A portfolio-based approach encourages companies to use recycled content wherever possible, rather than forcing content where it is not practical.
Finally, if PCR targets are set too ambitiously, companies may switch to alternative materials that may have a higher carbon footprint.
In addition to PCR targets, market-based mechanisms can also help strengthen demand. For example, EPR schemes can be structured to financially reward companies that incorporate recycled content through reduced EPR fees, alongside other measures that improve the competitiveness of recycled materials compared to virgin materials.
Please note: This is a commercial profile
This article will also be published in the quarterly magazine issue 26.
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