Australia and other nations have set ambitious targets to increase the sustainability of plastics and other materials used in packaging. Achieving these targets hinges on developing new ways to deal with the increasing use of single-use plastics over the coming years. Industry analyst Smithers recently released a report delving into the issue.
2025 is a key year for sustainability targets. It is the goal date for Australia’s 2025 National Packaging Targets and the EU is to require all member states to achieve a 77 per cent collection target by that year. But global consumption of rigid and flexible single-use plastics will continue to grow in 2025, according to recent research from industry analyst Smithers.
While the research found global use of single-use plastics would increase to 48.5 million tonnes in 2025, it also found progress towards these goals. However, the scale of the problem requires additional focus and new technologies to reach these targets that governments have set for themselves.
Ambitious goals
Despite multiple policies to restrict their use, global consumption of rigid and flexible single-use packaging will continue to grow to reach 48.5 million tonnes in 2025, even as Covid-19 reshapes the global economy.
The research, available in The Future of Single-use Plastic Packaging to 2025 report by Smithers, tracks how this will rise from a projected 40.4 million tonnes in 2020. This is equivalent to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.7 per cent for 2020-2025 and is a drop from the 4.0 per cent CAGR seen for 2015 – 2020.
Efficient mechanical recycling programmes are advancing in some markets targeting specific single-use types – polyethylene terephthalate (PET) drink bottles, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) dairy containers, and some PET and polypropylene (PP) food containers – which are excluded from the Smithers data.
The problem of flexibles
Instead, the industry is now focusing increasingly on recovering and processing flexible polymer formats, which represent 69 per cent of single-use plastic packs.
In parallel, it will need to react to changing consumer perceptions of packaging due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and reappraise the market proposition of recycled feedstocks as oil prices experience a short-term fall.
Smithers’ five-year forecast identifies the following key technology challenges for 2020-2025:
- Improving the recyclability of multi-layered, flexible plastic packaging;
- Lightweighting and redesigning rigid plastics to boost recycling;
- Leveraging advances in chemical recycling to address multi-layer flexibles, and mixed polymer waste streams;
- Implementing effective recycling technology for polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PvC) and other difficult to recycle plastics; or substituting to alternative materials where feasible;
- Developing new pigment or tracking platforms to enable black PET packaging to be sorted effectively in material recovery facilities (MRFs); and
- Implementing a recycling infrastructure for new consumers in less developed areas of the world, including the rising urban populations of Asia and Africa.
Different sectors, different impact
The impact will not be uniform across all sectors. The Smithers analysis shows that in 2020, 64 per cent of single-use plastics will be used in food packaging, 13 per cent in personal care, and just more than 8 per cent in pharmaceutical and medical applications.
Brand owners in these industries will have specific challenges, but Smithers finds that making the transition for plastic packaging into a circular economy model will require cooperation between all stakeholders. This includes legislators, plastic and packaging companies, consumers, industry associations, NGOs, and the waste management industry.
The status of single-use plastic packaging across the next five years is examined in depth in The Future of Single-use Plastic Packaging to 2025, (available at www.smithers.com). This includes detailed expert market and technology forecasting; and an exclusive data set segmenting the market by polymer type, packaging format, end-use application, and geographic and major national markets.
This article was first published in PKN Packaging News January-February 2020 print edition.
