Following the United Nations’ decision to adopt a global and legally-binding treaty by 2024 to end plastic pollution, an international group of scientific experts is calling for a cap on production of virgin plastics leading to phaseout of new production by 2040.
According to scientists from the UK, US, Canada, Germany, India, Norway, Sweden and Turkey, even when applying all political and technological solutions available today, including substitution, improved recycling, waste management, and circularity, annual plastic emissions into the environment can only be cut by 79 per cent over 20 years.
As such, they believe that ending plastic pollution also requires a dramatic change on the supply side.
The time for preventing plastic pollution is long past – the time for changing the future of plastics in our world is now.
Breaking down barriers
Yet we can’t cap virgin plastic production without taking drastic measures to step into the plastics gap with alternative solutions that effectively close the loop on our current post consumer material streams.
As global environmental awareness now appears to be reaching a critical tipping point, there is an urgent need to break down those barriers that are still holding recycling back. These include some of the more stringent challenges of meeting global industrial recycling standards for food-grade resins that would benefit from taking into account the many transformational recycling solutions coming on-stream.
Currently, food-grade resins represent only 10 per cent of the global annual capacity of recycled polymers of over 45 million tonnes, of which slightly over 20 per cent is food-grade rPET compared with only three per cent of food-grade polyolefins (according to ICIS Mechanical Recycling Supply Tracker).
This underscores the serious need to boost production of food-grade recycled polypropylene (PP) given that roughly 20 per cent of the world’s virgin plastic production is PP.
Technology brings transformation
Working towards achieving high-quality food-grade PP resin requires eliminating all contaminants from post-consumer waste that could be harmful to human health, as well as proving that the recycled material does not change the food composition, taste, and odour in an unacceptable way. Up until about two years ago the technology did not exist to achieve this, hence our reliance on virgin plastics for food packaging.
We are now entering a new era for recycling as innovative technology ushers in transformational shifts in what can be achieved, not only to sort post consumer packaging, but also to effectively eliminate any potential residues in the recycled plastics.
NEXTLOOPP is one such initiative that is now able to close the loop on food-grade post consumer PP. The global multi-participant project, that uses innovative technology by Nextek, differentiates itself by integrating a unique decontamination process post sorting, and is already trialling its prototype food-grade recycled PP (FgrPP) and inert (INRTgrade) resins in injection moulding, extrusion and thermoform package manufacturing.
Having successfully completed challenge tests as recommended by USFDA and EFSA, which require deliberately contaminating the plastic material to higher levels of contamination than typically found in the post-consumer stream, and measuring the rate of decontamination of the recycling process, NEXTLOOPP has been able to prove that its processes can strip out any migratable materials to safe levels.
Reframing the science
Despite these technological advances we may still face the huge constraints of big volume polyolefins recycling, precisely at a time when we need to be accelerating the research and technology developments in this direction.
According to a recently published paper by scientists Roland Franz and Frank Welle, of the Fraunhofer IVV, over-conservatism in the way food safety factors are calculated during the recycling and migration processes might significantly underestimate the safety of recycled plastics in packaging applications and overestimate the risks posed to consumers by high performance sorting and recycling processes. As a consequence, this could generate high, if not insurmountable, barriers to the application of post-consumer recyclates for food packaging; something that risks creating a stranglehold on recycled food-grade resins, especially the polyolefins, and counteracting the circular economy targets.
As Franz and Welle point out, consideration of the input levels of possible harmful contaminants in the recycling stream is a primary pillar in EFSA’s safety assessment framework. The statistical determination of such concentrations in washed flakes as raw input material for super-clean recycling is therefore important. They go on to say that it is quite obvious that this element is not a static figure and that these levels will change if different re-collection streams are used. Moreover, once re-collection streams are established the input concentrations will change and reduce over the years due to improvements in consumer behaviour, and also due to changes in the reduced use of hazardous chemicals and their lack of availability to the consumer. However, such data are largely, and broadly, lacking.
EFSA assumes the presence of genotoxic substances in the recycling feedstock even though genotoxic substances cannot be used in any goods placed on retail shelves, and that over-estimative prediction models for the migration calculation are used. These worst-case assumptions at every step make the overall evaluation extremely conservative.
Using the modern recycling infrastructure and the latest recycling technologies that we now have, to reframe the science and basic assumptions that regulatory bodies are reliant on, could be a lifeline for food-grade recycled resins and an added incentive to reduce the production of virgin plastics.
As it stands, EFSA’s vital constraints on meeting food contact conditions are highly conservative compared with similar standards set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the USA. Thankfully, cutting-edge advances in recycling technology, including state-of-the-art decontamination, now make specialised recycling processes highly effective in delivering “super-cleaned” recycled plastics such as PET, HDPE and PP.
New guidelines for circular recycling
Following NEXTLOOPP’s trials it is now aggregating numerous examples of products into an impressive catalogue of results to demonstrate the suitability of the project’s FgrPP – PPristine – and INRT resins.
Whilst these in-depth trial findings show that the process of creating food-grade recycled PP is highly feasible, they also highlight the fact that the recycling process is still more complex than it needs to be due to many current packaging design features. As a consequence, NEXTLOOPP is now working in conjunction with industry bodies to advise on new design guidelines for Food-Grade Circular Recycling which must become the new standard for packaging design.
Next generation circular recycling technology
Certainly there is a raft of new generation technology that recyclers will soon have at their fingertips. From fluorescent markers, artificial intelligence and decontamination techniques to game-changing technology to recycle polyolefin (LDPE, LLDPE, HDPE, PP) films, which are commonly used for packaging both edible and non-edible goods.
These films, which play a key role in protecting and extending the shelf life of many foods, are currently missing from the recycling stream as, to date, there has been no effective decontamination technology to turn them back into food-grade films.
COtooCLEAN is yet another Nextek multi-participant project that aims to fill this gap with a unique commercial process that can be integrated into mechanical recycling operations. This innovative process is based on super-critical CO2 (scCO2) combined with green co-solvents to remove oils, fats and printing inks in one single step, thereby effectively decontaminating polyolefin films back to food contact levels.
Easing the regulatory bottleneck
As the 2030 deadlines loom for mandates and sustainability related pledges, not to mention for the planet itself, companies need to be able to source an abundance of high-quality food-grade recycled resins. Currently, this supply is very limited and we are confident the emerging new technologies will help ease the regulatory bottleneck.
If we are to cap the production of virgin plastic without dramatically boosting our recycling capacity, we may find ourselves staring down another gun barrel with an equally high carbon footprint. Examples include waste-to-energy with its concerning levels of CO2e or chemical recycling, which in time will play a role in reducing our mixed and complex waste, but is still a long way from scaling up and, in the meantime, still tips our carbon footprint in the wrong direction.
Diverting plastics to either of these solutions, in effect, is wasting the material when we have far more impactful uses for post consumer plastics that have a much smaller carbon footprint.
So, while it is true that investment is needed across the board, from collection systems to recycling capabilities to increase the global supply of recyclates to reach industry targets, equally vital is the review of the criteria around food safety regulations, which now has the opportunity to revitalise the entire recycling industry.
In the long run, reducing the production of new plastics will go a long way to increasing the value of plastics, boosting efforts to curb plastic pollution and promoting our transition to a circular and sustainable economy. However, for maximum impact our efforts need to be coherent and co-ordinated across the entire plastics ecosystem.
This article was first published in the July-August 2022 print issue of PKN Packaging News, p14.
