Rethinking Plastics: Need for Convergence of Materials, Institutions and Formats for Circular Economy

What is the thing that we are surrounded with the most after atmosphere or air we live in? It’s one of the most ubiquitous materials on earth due to its unfathomable uses and almost unchallenged properties. Yes, you guessed it right, its Plastic and I am 100% sure that the device you are using to read this blog is also encased in plastic.

Delivering diligently since the start of the last century, its overproduction today and very limited recycling till date have come to haunt us and possibly hinting at an apocalyptic setting in a near future date wiping out the entire humanity.

A staggering half of all plastic produced ever is designed for a single use. Packaging industry by far uses the most plastic in the world by weight and almost 10% of total cost from cradle to grave including production, packaging, transportation and recycling, if at all, is occupied by packaging material costs.

This is a huge economy in itself and a classic case where the standardizations and protocols are needed just like in Intellectual property, internet, air traffic control, satellite systems etc.  at a world level. It is only then that the solutions for collection, marking, labeling, recycling would be converging and scalable in the truest sense.

Some of the most practical solutions which can be devised include convergence of labeling and material marking standards, convergence of composition and constitution of materials, redesigning and re-imagining plastics, a global framework for sustainable plastics designs across products and of-course a guiding torch and execution path through mandatory government led sourcing of these materials.

Convergence of Labeling and material marking standards

Lack of a standard symbol for recycling on labeling and packaging deters people from properly recycling materials which are recyclable. There is an urgent need for a well-designed, standardized system where convergence of recycling symbols happens across all packaging types dependent solely on the material they are made of. It is time that more prominence and meaning is also provided to the recycling symbols. To get to the root of the problem, we need to first understand the current and most prevalent recycling symbol system.

Recycling Identification through Resin Code

Every packaging carries this common resin identification code which is a number between one to seven. These numbers specifies the type of resin as shown below.

One of the most ironical things is that the recycling indicator was never intended to be a recyclability indicator to be used by customers but now it is in widespread use in packaging and thought to be used by consumers for their sorting. The indicated numbers never tell the different types of plastic molding processes through which it can be determined whether a product can be recycled. For example, there’  no surprise in the fact that blow-molded and injection-molded plastics have the same resin and they share the same code, they have different melting points and cannot be melted together for recycling.

This code of classification also requires one to remember the numbers and their recycling methods. Moreover, it is an inconsistent standard across countries and the purpose completely fails when one sends this to a different country’s shore for recycling.

Challenges of current labeling on packaging

•          Confusion in labels and markings on different materials.
•          No harmonization and inconsistent labeling systems across materials and countries.
•          Recycling infrastructure is unorganized leading to inconsistencies.
•          Common minimum labeling requirements different across different industries.

A better labeling system has been adopted in Europe where the Green dot logo used across packaging types and materials has become synonymous with recycling. The Green dot system has been in use since 1995 as a general license to a European Organization which then came to be used across whole of Europe through the central packaging recovery organization. The PRO Europe gives license to the European manufacturers for the use of the Green Dot Logotype. This symbol means that a financial contribution has been paid to a national waste management company that has been set up in accordance with a national law.

It needs mention here that not all green dot packaging get disposed off in the same bin but a large majority of it get disposed off together. This is the basic premise of the whole system and it rests on separate recycling streams as a secondary segregation mechanism adopted by the non-profit organizations which collectively use the system also as their common financing symbol.

Convergence of composition and Constitution of materials

Re-engineering Plastics

Plastic packaging by far remains the largest ever use of plastic materials produced till date and it will continue to top the charts in the foreseeable future. It uses on an average 26% of the total plastics produced. In today consumerism driven world, 95% of the plastic packaging material value is lost in first use itself without any chance of either a second life or recycling to another form. It is imperative to both rethink and re-engineer plastics to deliver far more benefits that they have been providing till now. Creating an innovative and re-engineered plastic in the first place which paves the way for an efficient recycling method would be an ideal first start. Reducing raw material consumption, alternative ways to produce plastic, creating an efficient after-use plastics economy with tight levers would be other mechanisms to trip the value chain where it is needed the most.

The effort needed is to reduce the ultimate environmental impact when the plastic leaks out into the natural environment. A bio-benign plastic that can reduce the negative impacts on the natural systems when leaked, while also being recyclable and competitive in terms of functionality and costs.

An Israel firm, Infimer Technologies has produced what it calls a completely recyclable composite polymer, called infimer. This material due to its unique recycling properties can be used as a raw material for the plastics industry. The same factory which produces the raw material also receives it in waste form and through a special “reactor” based process, 30-40% of the recycled infimer plastic can be reused with raw plastic materials to form new products.

Another innovative method which a US firm has pioneered is to capture the greenhouse gases and convert into plastics through a biocatalyst based process which combines air and methane and reassembles all the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules together to make into a thermoplastic called Air Carbon.

Plastics along with other materials need to move to a low-carbon future whereby a strong decoupling takes place from the fossil feed-stock. Governments world over should mobilize funds to develop innovative and path-breaking materials with whole LCA thinking built in during production stage itself.

Moving from a multi-layer plastic to mono-layer plastic, development of multi-layer reprocessing and recycling techniques, chemical separation techniques for difficult to recycle packaging material and simpler more standardized materials across countries would be the way forward.

Global Framework for Sustainable Plastics Design Across products

There is an urgent need for a global framework where all plastic raw materials and formations ever produced in future are constitutionally exactly same. Effort can be then multiplied in that direction and sustainable plastics, innovations can be replicated across countries, with manufacturers and recyclers.

Some of the innovations can be:

·         Depolymerization – Recycling plastics to monomer feed-stock for virgin-quality polymers.

·         Marine Degradable Plastics – Design plastics that are first less harmful and are also equipped internally to dissolve much faster in water.

·         Sourcing plastics from biomass – It is now proven that plastics can be sourced from vegetable fats and oils, corn starch, straw, woodchips, sawdust etc. Further innovations are needed so that they decompose faster in natural environments.

·         GHG-based plastics – Literally creating plastics out of thin air and it has been made possible in initial experiments.

Above methods and a host of other unique and path breaking innovations are needed to arrive at a sustainable framework for truly circular plastics economy.

Mandatory Intra and Inter-governmental sourcing commitments

Any innovation in the market such as electric cars, energy storage farms, and solar energy parks needs a big drive to ensure there is viability. If advances in circular economy are to be even envisaged, government needs to first ensure that it is one of biggest receivers of waste as raw material to start the path towards achieving circular economy. With key enablers in place, industry will seek better and more volume based solutions which would signal the advent of next stage in the value chain and path would be much clearer and defined. After-use polymers would be kept in their highest possible reuse state and would eventually tend to find much better solutions. Innovations would come in the space with industries erected specially for preparation of these materials to be used as raw materials in primary/secondary usages.

To improve the performance of an organization, it is essential to redesign and re engineer all of its processes. Similarly, an ecosystem can be improved drastically through redesigning what goes into it and what is intended to come out of it. With this thought, onus is on economies across the world to see how they want the sustainable future to look it and work towards a stable zero waste future.