When It Comes To Recycling, Design Matters

Designing for recycling matters.

Also, Monster isn’t very good at it.

Look, it’s not that I have anything in particular against energy drinks, other than the fact that its flavored trash water and the branding and packaging look like a monster truck rally commercial from the 80s brought to life, but they’re making some pressing no-no’s when it comes to their packaging.

You’ve seen the gargantuan, clawed cans-they're everywhere. They even have a line of caffe drinks that come in glass. When they were set to release their line of Hydro drinks, they wanted to talk up the beverages natural ingredients, so of course, they wanted to be transparent and use a PET bottle. After all, this was uncarbonated, lightly sweetened trash water that they thought consumers wanted to see.

So they took a PET bottle and slapped an aluminum can lid on the vessel and called it a day.

Now it’s not like Monster revamped their entire line of energy drinks to PET aluminum cans, but by combining these two materials in this way, they’ve created a monstrous headache for recycling facilities across the country. And Monster is hardly the only offender.

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ASTRX—applying systems thinking to recycling—was born out of an alliance between the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) and the Recycling Partnership. SPC has a wealth of knowledge about sustainable materials at their fingertips, and they work with a lot of global brands to make packaging better for the environment, while Recycling Partnership are experts when it comes to how Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) across the country operate.

So the ASTRX team wanted to know how materials and specific types of packaging progressed through sortation and the reprocessing stages in recycling, and they wanted to know if there were packages that created roadblocks in the system more than others.

Chances are, some of the material you’re putting in your recycling bin isn’t going to be recycled because some forms packaging are harder for an MRF to process. Plus, if the material can’t be recycled, it has an increased likelihood of going into a landfill, or in the case of a Monster Hydro drink, contaminating the recycling stream. If a PET reclaimer gets a hold of this bottle-meets-can hybrid, they’re not going to get properly sorted because they’re likely not outfitted with an eddy current magnet which helps separate non-ferrous metals like aluminum.

“The problem is that it does get into the recycling stream, because it's mostly PET, and it's the aluminum that causes problems,” says Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at Recycling Partnership. “It’s a damaging contaminant to the system once it goes down that road. It should be thrown out, but people aren't going to throw it out. They're probably going to try to recycle it.”

“When I talk to packaging designers, when I talk to big brands, of course there are people that know a lot about recycling, but I find when you're looking at the audience writ large, a lot of them know as much about recycling as your standard resident, which isn't a lot,” Dylan says.

That’s why they surveyed recycling facilities, PET reclaimers, paper mills, glass recovery operators, and more. They wanted to know what those problematic materials were, and so they compiled their report, the ASTRX Study of Material Recoverability. “We wrote this report both to identify challenges for specific materials but to also make a document that could be a reference guide for folks that are new to the recycling world so they can understand some of the nuances behind why there are challenges, and what the details are.”

It’s not just those Monster cans that are burdensome to an MRF, in general, the problem is mixed materials, and according to the study, they’re the bane of every MRFs existence, a barefoot on an airplane, an all caps email, the peanut butter to their tuna fish sandwich.

“If you want your package to be recyclable,” Dylan says, “you have to adhere to how the system exists as it is now.

“Multi-material packaging can really be a challenge,” Dylan says. “When I say that, I mean hybrid materials. Metal and plastic is a good example or different types of plastic in the same packaging. Some of it’s a little bit of metal and paper, but whenever you're putting two different things into something, it just makes it much more challenging to recycle that material.”

When you ask the system to manage a different material stream (and that’s even if a brand consulted with the waste stream to begin with), it simply can’t.

“As packaging is getting more complex, and generally speaking, smaller, it's going through a recycling system that wasn't designed to manage those materials,” Dylan says. ”The recycling system does not have the ability to adjust quickly.”

Not all MRFs are the same; what one facility takes in Washington might be different from one in Nebraska. They’re owned by different companies, and there’s no one mechanism that would allow them to change overnight. To do so would mean having the funding to reinvest in their facility so they could begin accepting those materials.

“If you want your package to be recyclable,” Dylan says, “you have to adhere to how the system exists as it is now. Or, you need to communicate why it's not recyclable to consumers, which, of course, is the challenge. That's one of the reasons why there is so much investment into this space because consumers don't really understand that.”

So what else do MRFs have a problem recycling? According to the study, black plastic is still an issue for MRFs because the infrared scanners that differentiate the various types of plastic have difficulty reading the material. And while Dylan himself would never talk down some of the environmental benefits of flexible packaging, the truth is, most MRFs aren’t currently configured to accept that material, and more investment needs to go into making it more recyclable.

But the biggest takeaway from the study?

“Design matters,” he says. “Depending on what you're doing on a package, it can have unintended effects.” For instance, if you add a shrink sleeve to a PET bottle, and it’s the wrong kind of shrink sleeve, or you put it over the entire bottle, and you leave zero PET showing, then that bottle probably won’t get recovered. And there is a robust market for PET, but if you’re using the wrong kind of resin as a cover for that bottle, you’re essentially killing that material’s value to end markets.

You want these materials to flow through the system with ease, and designers and brands need to ensure that their packaging can do just that. If they can’t, then brands need to message to consumers that the material isn’t recyclable, something that the How2Recycle label can help you do.

Brands and designers can also refer to the APR Design Guide for Plastics Recyclability, a free technical guide that shows them how to make something recyclable if they have to use plastic, whether it's the kind of inks they use or even the adhesives or shrinks sleeves that might be on something as common as a plastic bottle.

“You can't change everything overnight,” Dylan says. “But what you can do is you can change the way you talk to consumers, or how packaging brands talk to consumers, and that's where I think the real opportunity lies right now.”

“If you want something to be recyclable,” he adds, “it's not about putting a label on it, it's about it actually getting recycled. If you want it recycled, then you have to meet the recycling system where it is right now, otherwise, frankly, you're just greenwashing.”

ASTRX Study of Material Recoverability, Feeding End Markets: Creating Reliable and Valuable Raw Materials from Packaging will be released on May 23rd. Find out more here.