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Plastic Packaging Recycling: Conflicting Truths and Waning Patience

CPG companies should re-evaluate their reliance on plastic packaging and explore alternative strategies to reduce waste and promote sustainability.

Sterling Anthony
Sterling Anthony

Author’s note: In this column, “plastic packaging” refers to rigid or semi-rigid containers, especially those carrying the recyclability symbol of a number within a triangle of chasing arrows.

Decades into the sustainability era, recycling has not lived up to its promotion as a solution to plastic packaging solid waste. Concerns about plastic pollution have even gone global. For example, the United Nations Environment Assembly is working on a treaty aimed at alleviating the problem. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies will be impacted by evolving conditions, so now is the time to strategize. 

It’s not that CPGs have had no strategy about plastic packaging previously. To the contrary, promoting plastic’s recyclability seemed a logical strategy. Reduction (i.e., lightweighting) has its limitations, before negatively affecting package performance, machinability, etc. Reuse, too, has its limitations, subject to such factors as package size and open/reclose features. Of “the three Rs” [reduce, reuse, recycle] a strategy based on recycling made sense, justifying, for example, claims about the percentage of recycled content contained in a plastic package.

In the interim, what has become increasingly open to debate is whether recycling is a viable solution. An objective interpretation of industry forecasts is that the production of virgin plastic will continue to outpace recycling, short of intervening initiatives. Some critics claim that the plastics industry knows that recycling is not the solution but wants society to believe that it is. Even if one does not share such cynicism, one has to concede that the platforms for espousing it are many and varied.

CPGs need to strategize about which proposed intervening initiatives might see implementation. As a starting point, a company can be well-served by identifying those initiatives that are likely to have the most far-reaching ramifications. One such type of initiative is regulatory controls aimed at limiting annual production rates. Another type is to make the industry fund solution-seeking sustainability projects, grant-style. Even though the two types of initiatives would target the supply-side, CPG companies won’t escape the trickle-down effects. 

In response to production limits and/or funding mandates, the plastics industry will increase its prices, to maintain profit margins. That doesn’t mean that price hikes will be the only reaction. Increases in production efficiencies is another. Nonetheless, nothing else is as immediately implementable as the passing-along-of-costs. The first recipients will be package suppliers, who will add their mark-ups, to be paid by package users, such as CPGs. And for CPGs, packaging is indispensable. After all, it’s part of the name of that industry sector. Adding to its plight, a CPG might find itself facing not only price hikes, but changes in attendant factors, such as quantity-discount terms.  

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