¹ú²úÂ鶹

With global virgin plastic production continuing to outpace demand and utilization rates stuck in the low 70s, downward pressure on resin prices shows little sign of easing. At the same time, new U.S. tariffs on plastic and petrochemical trade – alongside the closure of the de minimis import loophole – are disrupting established supply chains and sending ripple effects through material recovery markets.

These shifts are complicating efforts to secure stable end-markets for recycled plastics, whilst also driving up operational costs for municipal and commercial recycling programs. In response, U.S. manufacturers are re-assessing sourcing strategies and exploring ways to adapt to a more volatile economic environment.

Notably, the closure of the de minimis loophole could help strengthen domestic recycling infrastructure by reducing reliance on low-cost, imported plastics. However, this transition will demand flexibility across the value chain, particularly from organizations previously dependent on foreign feedstocks.

Advancing Circularity with Food-Grade rPP

As the industry pivots toward greater self-reliance, one opportunity stands out: rigid and flexible food-contact polypropylene (PP) – one of the most prevalent yet under-recycled plastic – holds significant potential to help meet both regulatory mandates and corporate sustainability targets.

Unlocking its value could be a crucial step in building a more circular and resilient U.S. plastics economy. To gain a clearer perspective on how to harness this potential we need to understand why, to date, rigid and flexible food-contact polypropylene has been held back from the recycling stream.

Traditionally recycling has focused on bottles – starting with glass beer bottles all the way through to PET and HDPE bottles – whose recycling journey is now well entrenched around the world. When these single-use bottles first came to market they did so with the premise that they would be recycled – something which did not occur with other forms of plastic packaging such as pots, tubs and trays that were deemed to be ‘trash’ as they did not fit the traditional recycling model.

As such one of the challenges in the U.S. is the mis-conception of what is recyclable and what is trash and there are several key factors that reinforce this.

Re-Defining Trash

This starts with municipalities that are not collecting polypropylene (PP) pots, tubs and trays  (PTT) because of historical precedents and lack of awareness of the potential  value and demand from recyclers and brand owners. To address this we need a strong interaction with local authorities with instruction to recycle – there needs to be space made in the recycling stream for PTTs – which would include PET – because even PET pots, tubs and trays are slipping through the recycling stream.

MRFs need to get on-board to dispel the notion that collecting PP would dilute the value of the waste. The challenge here is that currently landfilling is seen as the simpler and certainly cheaper option. There is a crucial role here for waste management companies with support from organisations such as ClosedLoop Partners and The Recycling Partnership’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition to develop the infrastructure for the collection of PP products. Currently PP packaging is seen as the smaller fraction, hence many MRFs not having the right sorting station to separate out PP.

Historically a MRF sorts PET and HDPE representing approximately 80% of the total volume of plastics with the remaining 20% being mainly PP around 15% and the balance of 5% a mixture of other unsorted plastics such as Polystyrene, PVC, PLA and others. Whilst PP is currently a smaller fraction of the plastics stream it could be substantially higher if there was an active focus on PTTs.

Forecasting U.S. Trends

If we take the UK as an example of what occurs when the focus is on extracting the value of food-contact PTTs out of the waste stream we can forecast a positive outcome for the U.S.

According to RECOUP’s UK Household Plastic Packaging Collection Survey 2024, collection rates for PTT have increased since 2013, when it was at 20%, to around 174,000 tonnes of PTT collected, equivalent to a collection rate of 40%.  As of April 2024, 89% of UK local authorities now provide a kerbside collection scheme that includes PTT. As a consequence we are seeing a marked reduction of general waste collection and an increase in plastic and paper collection.

Risks of Not Creating Plastics’ Circularity

In fact we are now also seeing a stronger tendency towards the paperfication of packaging as retailers shift to plastic alternatives such as paper and aluminium. The plastics industry is actually harming itself by NOT creating a circular economy for food-grade PP as it risks being overtaken by alternatives that actually have higher carbon footprints in the long run.

PP is a major packaging material – in the UK it represents two thirds of the consumer packaging per weight and given that bottles are heavier than the PTTs this means their volume is greater. As such it should not be ignored. It is eminently recyclable and has numerous applications. What is lacking is the incentive and acknowledgement of the value of recycled PP from packaging.

Once councils collect the PTTs and MRFs agree to sort them, the next step is to ensure there is a market for them. Although the traditional market for recycled PP started with ordinary applications such as shipping pallets, crates and many other non-food rigid products – the tipping point for successful recycling requires going beyond these very generic, price competitive applications to closed loop systems that increase the incentive to recyclers.

Driving rPP’s Circularity

Of course this comes with its own set of challenges as recycling this material to food-grade compliance standards is a demanding process that requires technically sophisticated equipment and a new approach in order to make high-quality food-grade rPP. Yet addressing the recyclability of all plastics – particularly food-grade recycled PP – offers the best business case for expanding infrastructure and local recycling capacity.

Science-Proven Technologies

We now have proven, science-based processes to recycle post-consumer food-contact packaging back into rPP resins that are safe to turn back into food-grade rPP packaging. The science being applied is based on numerous investigations, measurement and tests to find out how well these compounds compare with virgin material and how well adjusted they are to specific processing techniques.

This means we have the capability to introduce high-value materials to replace virgin PP, which will create the required incentive for the recycler. Currently brand owners looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and make packaging more sustainable by using recycled content are restricted by the quality variability of the resins available.

Consistent Quality of Recycled Resin

Both consistency and quality of the recycled material is something plastics supply chain initiative, NEXTLOOPP Americas will address, starting with the quality of the feedstock, which will draw exclusively from the post-consumer waste stream, through to its engagement with the best technologies available to sort, wash, clean, and decontaminate.

This model has been successfully deployed in the UK and Europe via  NEXTLOOPP, which launched in 2020 as supply chain coordinators playing a pivotal role in driving collaboration across the plastics value chain. NEXTLOOPP’s high-performance technologies to decontaminate rPP, which is much more complex than recycling PET and HDPE due to the less crystalline nature of PP, relies on extracting volatile and semi-volatile materials in the melt stage and the solid state and NEXTLOOPP’s PPristine^TM food-grade resins have met the critical food contact compliance requirements of EFSA and USFDA as well as the modified Ames test showing no mutagenic responses.

Furthermore, Nextek has developed a novel and high performance decontamination  technology for polyolefin films, COtooCLEAN, that uses a supercritical CO2 process to extract contaminants to very high rates.

Design for Recycling Must Align with Circular Economy Requirements

It is clear that to address the more complex circular economy recycling issues we must continually reassess our guidelines for Design for Recycling, re-aligning with latest recycling technologies to overcome the hurdles. Ideally packaging should minimise the use of pigments wherever possible and ensure that any pigments used are stable and non-reactive after multiple recycling processes. This issue has not had a lot of attention so far. However, it is a key to ensuring recycled PP and other plastics remain suitable for new contact sensitive products such as food packaging, health and beauty product and cosmetics.

It is important to ensure that all on-pack decorative materials are totally removable – everything from adopting labelling systems that detach from the pack through to stable formulations for inks and binders that must be proven to be suitable for the subsequent recycling operations at the early stages of packaging design.

Likewise converters can engage with NEXTLOOPP Americas to meet their unique processing applications – from films and injection moulding to extrusion and thermoforming, NEXTLOOPP’s expertise is key to structuring the right blends and right properties for each application. By tailoring NEXTLOOPP Americas to local conditions, regulations, and resources, the initiative aims to become a partner of choice for organizations striving to boost plastics’ circularity plastic and demonstrate the recyclability of post-consumer food-grade rPP to meet corporate sustainability goals as well as regulatory requirements. COPY ENDS

The recycling sector is at a perilous crossroad. Ground-breaking progress has been achieved over the last few years, from improved collection and cutting-edge sorting amplified by AI’s potential, to innovative technologies emerging globally to recycle post-consumer plastic packaging back to high-value and food-grade resins.

Professor Edward Kosior of Nextek and NEXTLOOP can be reached at [email protected] and through .