The modifications demand investment and establish source and recovery cost categories in plastic recycling.
FREMONT, CA: Insufficient recycling capacity, consumer behavior, lack of access to recycling, and difficulty sorting challenging plastics all limit US recycling. With the acceleration of demand for recycled content and the economics of recycling reaching all-time highs, novel ways have emerged to recycle challenging plastics. There is a significant opportunity to solve sortation problems for difficult plastics, which include films, flexible things, foams, and small-format items. Rural areas have no recycling access, and giving access would require significant investments like buying new trucks or building material recycling facilities (MRFs). Recyclers want films for "advanced recycling." Feedstock preparation facilities (FPFs) to enhance MRF films would cost more, and FPFs and MRF upgrades may incur additional expenditures. The waste-management business has a lot of rigid plastics, but recyclers can only use them if the quality needs to be better.
Plastic packaging recycling rates vary: Plastic recycling rates vary today; rigid packaging has the highest recycling rates of all plastics. Bottles, like water, milk, and shampoo bottles, are allowed in curbside recycling programs. So, MRFs can separate single-stream recyclables with automated sorters and recover these bottles. Polyethylene (PE) films, bags, and food service items have high recycling rates. Commercial back-of-store collections generally recover films and flexibles. These problematic plastic packaging types—PE films, multilayered packaging, thermoforms, foams, and-make up around metric tonnes (MT) of the post-use plastics generated. Recyclers have yet to use this plastic as feedstock.
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Increase post-use plastics recovery: FPFs can improve bale quality, helping the plastics recycling sector overcome market disconnects created by feedstock quality. FPFs can aggregate and improve plastic waste for downstream processors. Recycled plastic premiums allow reinvestment at each step. Front-of-store consumer drop-offs and back-of-store baling can collect low-cost post-use film from big and midsize commercial sources. This method will require advanced recycling and trash industry partnerships. CPG companies employing post-use plastics to achieve recycling goals need recycled plastics. Many CPG businesses pledge to use recycled plastics.
Decontaminating sewage streams: FPFs can boost polyolefin content to meet advanced recycling criteria and aggregate volume from MRFs to feed progressive recyclers. FPFs can also remove plastics using ballistics, eddy current, magnets, or optical sorters. They can also shred, densify, or extrude feedstock to match the needs of each recycling facility. FPFs can divert MRF films from landfills, and MRFs that can handle flexible films can start using their capabilities. After these MRF capacities are exhausted, the industry can add ballistic or optical sorters to accept more films from household and small business sources.
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