Solutions for effectively recycling film and flexible plastic are as complex and multilayered as the material itself, speakers at a Northeast Recycling Council webinar said on Thursday.
Scaled solutions are necessary to collect, process and recycle higher volumes of film and flexible packaging, speakers said. Rapidly approaching recycling rate requirements from extended producer responsibility laws, particularly in California, are creating pressure. At the same time, MRF operators and reclaimers face economic challenges from processing the material and finding end markets.
Speakers discussed how new pilot programs, data collection initiatives, MRF subsidies and policy updates are influencing the film and flexible recycling landscape in the U.S. But more coordination is needed across these collection, recycling and manufacturing supply chains, speakers said.
Here are some takeaways from the discussion with speakers from the Flexible Film Recycling Alliance, the US Flexible Film Initiative, Delterra, The Recycling Partnership and Circular Action Alliance.
California EPR deadlines are putting pressure on the need for solutions
Packaging EPR laws are creating a more urgent timeline for the industry to figure out better, more efficient flexible and film packaging recycling systems. California’s SB 54 — which calls for 65% of single-use plastic packaging to be recycled by 2032 — is a major factor in this, said Roxanne Spiekerman, plastics director at the Circular Action Alliance, California’s producer responsibility organization.
Currently, CalRecycle estimates its recycling rate for flexible and film packaging is less than 5%, she said.
Katherine Huded, executive director of material systems at The Recycling Partnership, said its initiatives like CalFFlex were designed to accelerate solutions to that problem.
“We want EPR to work so that the recycling system can work. So, our goal is really to find solutions for residential film and flexibles to actually get recycled, especially in California,” she said.
As SB 54 begins to take effect, it could lead to a “massive injection of post-residential PE film into this system,” of anywhere between 400,000 and 800,000 tons, said Shannon Bouton, president and CEO of nonprofit Delterra, which works with companies and local governments to design recycling system improvements.
“Right now, the system is not set up to actually be able to recycle that. There aren't enough converters or reclaimers in the system to be able to do that,” she said.
Looking ahead, recyclers, reclaimers and brands need to work more closely together to beef up the supply chain for this material, she said, because “we just don't have enough offtake of this material, which is why these recyclers are not working with the material, and that is partly due to the fact that this is not yet a mature market.”
But Bouton says not all hope is lost. Many European countries have had EPR for decades and have experience recycling flexible and film plastic and incorporating it into products, she said.
That type of plastic isn’t currently being incorporated into new products in the U.S. at scale, “so that's what we set out to try and help solve.”
Collection systems require nuance and targeted improvements
U.S. collection systems for film and flexible plastics are mainly concentrated to drop-off centers at stores or depots, and very few curbside programs accept the material.
At the same time, “we tend to talk about flexible films as if they're a monolith, when in fact we have a wide diversity of flexible films, and that impacts what we can and can't do, and what our success rate is” for collection and recycling, said Kyla Fisher. Fisher is a sustainability consultant for the Flexible Film Recycling Alliance, an initiative founded by the Plastics Industry Association.
FFRA sees opportunities to expand drop-off collection alongside improvements to MRF infrastructure that could also help make curbside collections more feasible in the future, she said.
At the same time, “despite 20 plus years of having store drop-off, consumers still don’t know what they can and can’t recycle in store drop-off. What does that mean then for curbside? There’s an opportunity to improve that education,” she said.
FFRA is also working on a pilot program to target another source for film plastic: volumes from what she describes as “small and mid-sized enterprises” such as schools, that generate a lot of film plastic but don’t have an easy avenue for recycling it. “How do we make sure the logistics work, so instead of doing milk runs, which are costly and inefficient, how can we leverage existing logistics so that we can have better reverse logistics chains?”
Two such pilots will kick off in California this summer, and FFRA hopes to have data to share on the outcome sometime in 2027.
Flexible film recycling needs funding
Once the plastic gets collected, MRF operators need support to be able to effectively process it, said Maite Quinn-Richards, executive director at the CPG-led US Flexible Film Initiative. USFFI aims to demonstrate that MRFs can effectively recycle film and flexible packaging — as long as those MRFs and reclaimers are paid operational subsidies to make it work.
“Flexible film [recycling] needs subsidies right now, because the economics just don’t support the full cost of the sortation and cleaning and processing and moving that material to the reclaimers,” she said.
MRFs have to contend with material that’s often contaminated or so lightweight that it gets mixed into the paper stream. At the same time, most of the film entering MRFs these days “is purely incidental. It’s going into these MRFs because it’s being wishcycled,” she said.
Quinn advocates for more contracts to formalize downstream deals for the material and create more stability and predictability in the market.
“MRFs don't want to invest in recovering film if there's no reliable downstream buyer. Reclaimers can't confidently invest in additional processing capacity if they don't know they have consistent supply that's available,” she said.
The Recycling Partnership is also working with MRFs moving this material through the recycling stream, said Huded. That work includes projects with two MRFs and one secondary sorting facility in California, she said.
“We're staying closely connected with USFFI, as some of those facilities may need assistance to move some of that material,” Huded said.
So far, the project involves sending test loads to facilities and “pre-investing” in end markets for the material, she said. TRP is also planning to offer technical assistance and financial support for capital improvements.
The goal is to “really make sure that this material is moving and able to move as EPR implementation starts to go live next year in California,” she said.
End market demand is also an important area of focus, Bouton said. Delterra — with funding from Amcor and Kraft Heinz, and technical support from Eunomia — launched an initiative in December to test methods for adding resin from recycled flexible film into new products that are not currently using it in the United States.
The pilot aims to demonstrate that it’s possible, she said, but also to quantify what percentage of recycled resin is doable and what kind of financial support might be needed to “make this whole system viable for these products,” she said.
“We want to build the underlying business case, so that we can understand what financial mechanisms will be required to sort of start to scale this use of the material,” said Bouton.
As all these pilots and investments come together, better data-gathering practices will also need to come into play, Fisher said. Data transparency will help the whole system make improvements to collection and processing, and also show that these challenging materials are actually being recycled into new products.
“We need to make sure that we have consumer trust,” she said.
