Circular economy and sustainable materials management (SMM) are buzzwords that have gained popularity recently; but, as one speaker at Plastics Recycling 2017 said, both concepts have the same goal: creating a reliable supply chain that incorporates recyclables. Nina Goodrich of GreenBlue and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), Charlottesville, Virginia, said SMM and the circular economy, two approaches to using and reusing materials more productively over their lives, had more similarities than differences. She added that both approaches are concerned with creating a “reliable supply chain from waste.” Goodrich and the other speakers during the session stressed that this would need to be a collaborative process if it was going to be successful. Stephen Sikra, who is responsible for the development of people, packages and processes at Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G), Cincinnati, said his company’s goals are to use 20 percent less material in its packaging and to double its use of recycled resin in packaging. “We want your PCR (postconsumer recycled resin),” he told attendees. Sikra added the P&G recognizes that it has a role to play in recycling by designing packaging for recycling, inspiring consumers to recycle, advancing recycling infrastructure and creating demand for PCR. When it comes to investing in recycling infrastructure, the company is working with the Closed Loop Fund and The Recycling Partnership, he said. Other recycling-related collaborations P&G is involved in include the How2Recycle Label, Materials Recovery for the Future and TerraCycle. P&G funds recycling programs managed by TerraCycle for packaging that cannot be recycled via curbside programs, Skira said. “TerraCycle is a bridging program until curbside recycling is available for packages that offer better overall sustainability but may not be recyclable at the curbside.” One of collaborations between P&G and TerraCycle will use plastics collected at beaches to produce the bottles for Head & Shoulders. The bottles will be made from up to 25 percent recycled beach plastic. P&G, in partnership with TerraCycle and Suez Environnement, based in Paris, will begin the recycling program in France by the middle of this year, producing a limited-edition shampoo bottle. The shampoo will be sold through the retailer Carrefour.  

If you think materials collected at the curb represent a difficult mix of contaminated plastics, try pulling them off the beach and recycling them. But that’s exactly the challenge TerraCycle and its partners have decided to confront in Europe. Trenton, N.J.-based TerraCycle is managing an entirely new supply chain, one that begins with environmental activists who collect litter from beaches and ends with the sale of recycled-content pellets to one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, which is using them in hair-care product bottles. Over the past two months, TerraCycle has collected 12 tons of beach plastics. That volume is expected to grow in coming months, because most beach cleanups occur during the spring and summer seasons. Brett Stevens, TerraCycle’s vice president of material sales and procurement, and Ernie Simpson, the company’s global vice president of research and development, discussed the challenges and successes of the effort with Plastics Recycling Update. They provided a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work needed to bring the beach plastics into HDPE bottles for Head & Shoulders, a Procter & Gamble (P&G) brand. Stevens will talk about the project during a plenary session focused on marine plastics at the Plastics Recycling 2017 conference. Entitled “A Sea of Challenges,” the session will also include presentations from Stewart Harris of the American Chemistry Council, Ted Siegler of DSM Environmental and Tamsin Ettefagh of Envision Plastics. On the beach It starts where the land meets the sea. On beaches across Europe, a variety of nonprofit organizations are already removing litter as part of environmental preservation efforts. Most of the time, however, litter is thrown into garbage cans. “What TerraCycle is doing is basically contacting these organizations who are doing pick-ups and trying to access the plastics that they are collecting that they would ordinarily be throwing out anyway,” Stevens said. “There’s really no organization too big or too small.” The company, which has a presence in 21 countries, is providing them with the supplies they need to collect and ship the rigid plastics they find. Those could include gaylords or bulk shipping bags. TerraCycle also pays their shipping costs. The recovered mix is shipped to TerraCycle warehouses. TerraCycle has warehouses in each of the European countries where it operates. Stevens said those warehouses aggregate the material. When the piles get big enough, say a couple thousand pounds or kilograms, manual sorting begins. Sorting it out As any sortation facility operator knows, you’re going to get a lot you didn’t ask for. That’s also the case with recovered beach plastics. TerraCycle asks for rigid plastics but will receive contaminants including seaweed, wood, metals, fishing nets, rope and other non-rigid plastics, Stevens said. Manual sorters work to remove obvious contaminants to generate a stream of mixed rigid plastics. The manually sorted rigids are then shipped to a sortation facility run by Suez, a Paris-based water and waste management giant. Last fall, Suez bought shares in TerraCycle’s operations in Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.K. That made them a vested partner and a natural fit for the back-end processing of the beach plastics, Stevens said. TerraCycle pays Suez to sort the plastics by resin using a host of existing technologies. Those include optical and NIR sorters, float-sink tanks, electrostatic separators and air-density separators. The goal is to recover HDPE, but the sortation also yields streams of PET, PP, PS and other resins, Stevens said. “We are recovering all of the other types of resins during that mechanical separation process,” he said. As is the case with HDPE, the other polymers are shredded, washed, and dried. These materials are then extruded into recycled products such as benches and picnic tables, which P&G will be purchasing in order to donate back to collection organizations and beaches. Building a pellet The HDPE regrind travels to a different Suez facility for pelletization and compounding. That plastics reclamation facility is where TerraCycle also ships virgin bottle-grade HDPE and other additives. To ensure the finished pellet meets the manufacturer’s specifications, the plastics are extruded using a proprietary formulation. It’s challenging, because the beach plastics may have incurred damage from the elements, including long exposure to UV radiation. You have to estimate a certain level of degradation in beach plastics, said Simpson. After that, the trick becomes rebuilding the plastic’s properties to meet bottle manufacturer specifications. “The real key is to make sure that you’re able to build the properties to the proper quality so it can be used in the final end product and to also make sure that the material is clean enough to be used in the end product as well,” he said. The pellets contain additives to counteract degradation, kill bacteria and otherwise ensure they’re stable and able to pass safety tests. “I like to draw the parallel between this and cooking: If you are following a recipe and all of a sudden you make your dish too spicy … what can you add to your dish to counteract that?” Stevens said. Before the pellets are supplied to the bottle maker, a third-party tests them to make sure they don’t contain anything hazardous to humans. The partner companies also take steps to ensure the finished pellets contain the required percentage of beach plastics: The processing lines are given a full cleanout before the beach plastic materials are run through the system, and TerraCycle and P&G send representatives to supervise processing through to pellets. The finished bottle TerraCycle supplies the finished beach plastic pellets to P&G’s bottle manufacturer in Europe. This company blends the beach plastic pellets with its own HDPE before blow-molding the mix into a finished bottle. The result is a gray-colored shampoo bottle containing 25 percent recycled beach plastic. Other companies have tried using beach plastics in bottles before. The differences were they included lower recycled content levels, Stevens said, and they weren’t easily recyclable. In one instance, for example, the finished bottle was black, making it difficult to sort. The pellets made with beach plastics cost more than virgin HDPE pellets, Stevens said, but the real value is in the story the material is able to tell. That story — and the uniqueness of the product — can help P&G secure more retail shelf space. The first 150,000 limited-edition Head & Shoulders bottles with beach plastics will be sold this summer at Carrefour, a worldwide retailer headquartered in France. “We felt that the leading shampoo brand in sales should lead in sustainability innovation and know that when we do this, it encourages the entire industry to do the same,” Lisa Jennings, vice president of Head & Shoulders and global hair care sustainability leader for P&G, stated in a press release. “We’ve been fortunate to work with such great partners in TerraCycle and Suez to make this vision a reality.”  

Procter & Gamble recently collaborated with TerraCycle and Suez, the largest waste management company in Europe, on the world's first fully recyclable shampoo bottle made with 25% plastic collected from beaches. This packaging made with post-consumer recycled (PCR) content will soon be available in France. A recent report from the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in the UK reveals that of the 300 million tons of virgin plastic that's produced annually, 43% ends up incorrectly deposited in the garbage and ends up in landfills. This is particularly significant because it means that most plastic packaging is used only once. Considering that the look and shape of the Head & Shoulders shampoo bottle seems to remain unchanged, the makeup of this shampoo bottle sets a precedent that brands across multiple industries should take note of.

A year ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum found that most plastic packaging is used only once; 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80 billion-$120 billion annually, is lost to the economy after a short first use. This challenges the world to drive greater recovery and reuse of plastics, and create solutions that see that plastics never become waste. During this year's Davos, Procter & Gamble announced that it has teamed up with us at TerraCycle and SUEZ, the largest waste management company in Europe, to source, develop and put out the first fully recyclable shampoo bottle made from up to 25% recycled beach plastic for the world’s number one shampoo brand, Head & Shoulders. The first 150,000 bottles will be available in France this summer, making it the world’s largest production run of recyclable shampoo bottles made with beach plastic, and a major step in establishing a unique supply chain that supports a new plastics economy. Working directly with thousands of volunteers and hundreds of NGOs and other beach cleanup organizations, TerraCycle sources the shipments of rigid plastics collected through beach cleanup efforts, capturing these materials for recycling for the first time, at no cost to participants. TerraCycle’s partnership with SUEZ tackles logistics (collection and shipment) and processing (separation and material pelletization) of these mixed plastics so they can be used as recycled raw material. The scale of the beach plastics project focuses on the goal of incorporating more post-consumer recycled content (PCR) across other P&G brands and globally, inspiring other world entities to do the same. P&G has been using PCR plastic in packaging for over 25 years, last year using over 34,000 metric tons, and its Hair Care division is projected to see half a billion bottles per year include 25% PCR by the end of 2018. Today’s announcement is an important step in P&G’s mission to meet the Corporate 2020 goal of doubling the tonnage of PCR used in plastic packaging. P&G, using the programme created by TerraCycle and SUEZ as a sourcing method, not only creates a market for recycled plastics, but a sustainable supply chain designed to feed back into itself. This collaborative partnership is a milestone in how organizations can look to partner up in order to deliver major environmental changes across industries. The benefit of putting forth the resources to divert plastics from landfills and create a market for them in the value system is many-fold. Approximately 10–20 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans each year. These include microplastics, which result in an estimated $13 billion a year in losses from damage to marine ecosystems (not to mention the severe degradation to natural capital suffered by animals and their habitats) and financial losses to fisheries and tourism. If things don’t change, we are projected to see more plastics than fish in the ocean by 2050. Of the more than 300 million tons of new, virgin plastic produced globally per year, it is estimated that up to 129 million tons (43%) of the plastic used is disposed of in landfills; in the United States, the EPA’s most recent report places the plastics recovery rate for recycling at 9%. Linear solutions for plastic waste miss out on opportunities to capture and use these resources, reinforcing our dependence on fossil fuels and incurring an avoidable degree of structural loss. The interesting thing about beach plastic is that there is so much of it, and companies like P&G see the ROI potential for harnessing those resources and rolling out their own sustainability initiatives. When consumer goods companies make the commitment to put out products made from non-virgin raw material, it creates a circular system that can be nurtured and expanded for sustainable growth and positive impact.

We all make purchases because the packaging attracts us to the product, whether we really need the item or not. The shape is pretty or unique. Maybe utilitarian. The colors are lovely. You can store all your loose change in it. There are all kinds of reasons we buy what we buy. But more and more, consumers, in particular Millennials, make purchases based on the brand’s corporate social responsibilities. They expect their brands to commit to social and environmental responsibility and will support those brands with undying loyalty. Enter P&G. It is debuting fully recyclable shampoo bottles made with 25% recycled plastic. The plastic is collected after washing up on beaches around the world for bottles of Head & Shoulders Shampoo. To get the word out to consumers, the bottles include the callout, “Plastique Collecte Sur La plage.” The first 150,000 bottles will appear on store shelves in France this summer. The initiative expanded P&G’s focus to include more post-consumer recycled content in its packaging. “We felt that the leading shampoo brand in sales should lead in sustainability innovation and know that when we do this, it encourages the entire industry to do the same,” says Lisa Jennings, Vice President, Head & Shoulders and Global Hair Care Sustainability Leader, Procter & Gamble. “We’ve been fortunate to work with such great partners in TerraCycle and SUEZ to make this vision a reality.”

Last week, I reported on the news that business and government leaders have endorsed a new plan to tackle plastics waste issues and to increase plastic packaging recycling to 70%, which they called, “The New Plastics Economy.” Well, looks like it’s not just all talk after all. Consumer goods giant P&G announced that it will produce the “world’s first” recyclable shampoo bottle made from up to 25% recycled beach plastic.  P&G partnered with innovative recycler TerraCycle and SUEZ, a waste recovery company, on this new packaging initiative, which will be released in France this summer as a limited-edition Head & Shoulders (H&S) bottle available to consumers in Carrefour, a retailer in France. P&G claims that this will be the world’s largest production run of recyclable bottles made with post-consumer recycled (PCR) beach plastic, and a first major step in establishing a unique supply chain that involves the support of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of NGOs collecting plastic waste found on beaches.  Additionally, P&G announced that in Europe by end of 2018 more than half a billion bottles per year will include up to 25% post-consumer recycled plastic. This represents more than 90% of all the hair care bottles sold in Europe across P&G’s hair care portfolio of flagship brands like Pantene and Head & Shoulders. The project will require a supply of 2,600 tons of recycled plastic every year – the same weight as eight fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jets.   According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy and on the current track, there could be more plastics than fish in the ocean (by weight) by 2050. “At P&G, we believe that actions speak louder than words. The increased use of PCR plastic across our hair-care portfolio of brands, demonstrates our continued commitment to driving real change,” says Virginie Helias, vice president of global sustainability, P&G. “The Head & Shoulders recyclable shampoo bottle made with beach plastic is a world’s first in the hair care category. Increasing the use of recycled plastic in the packaging of our flagship brands, like Pantene and Head & Shoulders, makes it easier for consumers to choose more sustainable products, without any trade-offs. So while we’re proud of what we’ve done and what we’re doing, we know there is much more work ahead.” Hopefully one day we will see these beach plastic recyclable bottles on U.S. store shelves as well. 

There are about 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean, a great deal of which is washing up on beaches around the world, resulting in the high-profile fouling of shorelines in Hawaii and Alaska. In an effort to clean up some of this pollution, consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble is planning to produce Head & Shoulders shampoo bottles partly made from beach plastic. The company told The Guardian that the containers will be made from 25 per cent of these recycled materials, collected by thousands of volunteers on the shorelines of France. P&G called it a “first major step” towards establishing a supply chain using the recycled debris. “We felt that the leading shampoo brand in sales should lead in sustainability innovation and know that when we do this, it encourages the entire industry to do the same,” Lisa Jennings, vice-president of global hair at P&G, said in a release. The pilot project, which also involves recycling business TerraCycle and waste management firm Suez, will result in up to 170,000 recycled bottles on shelves across France this summer, according to The Guardian. Steve Morgan, the technical director of plastics recycling organization Recoup, told The Guardian that it is a “technological breakthrough,” despite its limited run. “In the past when companies have tried to use plastics that have been sourced from oceans or beaches, it hasn’t been technically possible because of the exposure to UV, and also the plastics degrade and don’t recycle that well. What they’ve done here is make it technically viable, which is kind of the big thing,” said Morgan. He added that the techniques used by P&G could become “more mainstream” once the technology is further developed and the cost advantage improves. The company also promised to produce more than a 500 million of the same type of bottles per year across Europe by the end of 2018. P&G said this figure represents 90 per cent of all of its haircare bottles sold on the continent. It estimated it will require 2,600 tonnes of recycled plastic each year, or the equivalent of eight fully-loaded Boeing 747s. The company is aiming to double the amount of PCR plastic, post-consumer resin or reclaimed material, that it uses in packaging by 2020. “Increasing the use of recycled plastic in the packaging of our flagship brands, like Pantene and Head & Shoulders, makes it easier for consumers to choose more sustainable products, without any trade-offs,” said Virginie Hellas, vice-president of global sustainability at P&G. “So while we’re proud of what we’ve done and what we’re doing, we know there is much more work ahead.” The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a United Kingdom-based non-profit, estimates that plastic production will double in the next 20 years. However, current efforts are only leading to 14 per cent it being recycled. But it estimates that number could be bumped up to 70 per cent.