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Good afternoon world! What a gorgeous day it is in Chicago! I am writing from my favorite Starbucks in downtown Chicago; it has a 360 degree view of all the hustle and bustle of a normal work day in the busy financial district!

So yea, my plan didn’t necessary go according to plan: I contacted one of the organizations that is responsible, in part, for the progress being made in recycling thermoforms and asked if they could produce some kind of press release detailing the progress being made, and referencing the responsible parties. My intention was that in having the responsible parties generate a press release, they could control the content and distribution, thereby allowing them to educate the industry on the progress in recycling thermoforms, while being recognized as those who have been driving said progress. After all, I have had nothing to do with the progress being made in the last 18 months, and in no way wish to take credit there for it; I simply wanted to inform the industry that progress was in fact being made, in hopes of elevating the reputation of our industry.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the progress being made is at the point where the various organizations involved feel comfortable informing the industry for fear that the progress may somehow be halted. Whether or not that is the case, I have to respect their opinions as I respect the work they have done and in no way wish to be a deterrent to their continued work on this issue.

So, sorry guys…I guess all good things come to those who wait?

On a higher note, I have been invited to meet the gentleman speaking at an industry shin dig during Pack Expo, as he is a DePaul Fellow of the Business Ethics Institute. Because I am a DePaul alumni and received my bachelors degree in ethics, the event organizer thought I would like the opportunity to pick his brain, which I totally do!

Perhaps this will be a good time to look into furthering my education…muhahaha.

Have a jolly afternoon!

Hello and happy Friday! Oh boy do I have a treat for you!

As some of my more diligent followers know, I have not been blogging about my work on recycling thermoforms because of other marketing obligations. That being said, it just so happens that I got to kill two birds with one stone: I was given the task of writing my very own white paper on the state of recycling clamshells and blisters in America for our outgoing marketing piece for August! How cool is that! It took a lot of work, but to be honest, once I started, it sort of just flowed out of me. Perhaps researching issues around recycling thermoforms for almost a year allowed for the easy transmission of information. This report is probably the most technical piece I have ever written, aside from my senior thesis on our secular age, capitalism, and the Frankfurt school. If anyone is interested, let me know, only two people have ever read this masterpiece; my professor and myself! Ha!

So yea, I am pretty proud of this report because it summarizes why thermoforms are not really recycled in America and what we as an industry can do to change it. While I intend on presenting this report to different publications for further exposure in addition to putting it on our website and using it for our marketing, I thought I would share it with you, my packaging and sustainability friends, first! There are some tweaks I still intend on making, and I would love any feedback you can surmise! Also, we still need to put the bells and whistles on it so it looks like a “real” white paper.

Again, this recycling report is a compilation of my research on recycling with suggestions for our industry.

Check it out!!! Oh, and I apologize but all the footnotes can only be displayed as end notes...

 

After sending out several emails to contacts in different organizations (who wish to remain anonymous), I received the following information about non-bottle PET recycling. Hopefully you will find this information as valuable as I did in my journey to discover why PET clamshells, blisters, trays and components are not recycled in most American communities.

Quick answers:

1. Including blister packs into PET bottle recyclate is unlikely to be good idea;
2. Clear PET trays might be technically okay to be mixed in with PET bottles – but there is a sorting problem due to PVC;
3. PET trays/clamshells/blister packs could be sorted out of the residual mixed plastics waste to make an rPET grade – although this may prove to be more restricted in markets than bottle recyclate.

PET types

Blister packs that aren’t PVC generally use a copolymer of PET called PET-G or PETG. This is softer and tougher than standard PET and can’t crystallize, so is used for some PET films and thin sheet applications because the manufacturing is easier (even though the material is a bit more expensive). ?Some clamshells and trays use PET-G, but most will use standard PET identical to that used for bottles. All ovenable frozen food trays use crystallized PET as they need to stay rigid at high temperature – this is chemically identical to bottle grade, but most frozen food trays are pigmented anyway?

PET-G can be a problem in PET recycling. A little bit probably would never be noticed, but if significant sources of PET-G were going to be used as feedstock for any particular process, this would have to be fully tested in trials by the re-processor and the end-users – recyclate for use in bottles (made by injection stretch blow molding) might not be able to accept much PET-G without quality problems, but a recyclate intended for trays or clamshells (made by sheet extrusion and thermoforming) might be fine.

PVC Issue

Getting PET packages recycled also depends on the confidence and cost of being able to extract the PET from the commingled plastics without excessive PVC contamination, which degrades at PET processing temperatures (causes yellowing, black specks and may affect food-contact status)

Since clear PVC is widely used in these sort of packages as well as PET and the two are visually indistinguishable except by inspection of the plastics code (if present) then manual pre-sorting and final checking won’t be feasible based on container shape as it is for bottles. Therefore the automatic sorting would have to start from a very high contamination level– this increases the difficulty of getting to a low enough level of PVC content.

With PET bottle recycling, it is already a little difficult to keep PVC low enough, as PVC gets into the bottle stream anyway in the form of labels and cap liners – if you tried to include trays etc, then only a few PVC packs would need to sneak through the sort process to downgrade a batch.

Hence, recyclers are hesitant to include PET clamshells, trays etc with sorted PET bottles because they might end up with lower incomes despite the higher volumes.

All this means to me that it is more sensible to try to get PET clamshells and trays from the mixed plastics fraction (after already removing bottles) and finding a market for that quality of rPET, rather than trying to sort bottles and clamshells/trays together. This is the approach being tested by WRAP (Nextek are running a project for them).

Okay…so based on this insight, it is more feasible to create a new end-market for mixed rigid plastic material than to try and integrate our PET packages into the existing PET-bottle recycling infrastructure…

That’s all for today folks; I think we should all let this information sink in. Tune in tomorrow for more discoveries about recycling in America!