Plastic (29 page)

Sheehan and other EPR advocates say it's time for private industry to start paying for the collection, disposal, and recycling of those products. Making producers financially responsible for end-of-life waste management gives them the incentive to be less wasteful from the get-go, Sheehan explained. If they have to pay to recycle their products, they'll be more likely to design them for better recyclability, picking materials, such as PET, that are compatible with existing recycling streams.
Such schemes create a positive feedback loop that municipal recycling simply cannot.

Some of this is back to the future. Those refillable-bottle programs that disappeared with the arrival of PET bottles? They were an early form of EPR. Bottle bills also represent a version of producer responsibility, since they require the industry to take the bottles back. But producer responsibility was launched as a movement in 1991 when Germany introduced the first explicit EPR law, the Teutonicly titled Ordinance on the Avoidance of Packaging Waste. It required manufacturers and brand owners to provide for the recovery and recycling of the packaging associated with their products. At the time, German landfills were nearing capacity—packaging waste was a major culprit—and the country was starting to have to export its trash to neighboring countries. The government set ambitious goals, requiring that 64 to 72 percent of packaging materials be recovered for recycling, for example, but left it to industry to determine how to fulfill them.

The result was the Duales System Deutschland and its Green Dot program, which has become a model for managing packaging waste around the world. Companies pay licensing fees to a nonprofit corporation for the right to put a logo—the famous Green Dot—on their packaging; this tells consumers they can put those packages in the recycling bins. The licensing fees help cover the costs of the for-profit corporation that then collects, separates, recycles, and processes the green-dotted waste. Over 75 percent of all packaging in Germany now carries a green dot, including, of course, PET bottles.
And the program has expanded across Europe; tens of millions of packages sold in European stores now bear the Green Dot logo, which, unlike our resin code system, is a genuine guarantee that they will be recycled.

The law has accomplished most of its goals—and more. It has boosted recovery rates of packaging waste to more than 76 percent and hiked up plastics recycling to 60 percent; in some years, the numbers are even higher.
It has also stimulated the development of new sorting and recycling technology to help the country meet those mandates. Germany's law became the model for a similar measure passed by the European Parliament in 1994. While that law set recycling targets, it left it to individual countries to determine how they would go about meeting them. Different countries have chosen different routes—varying arrangements of public and private initiatives—but the overall story is much the same. Less packaging is going to landfills, even while consumption has continued to grow. Overall, Europe now diverts more than half of its postconsumer-plastic waste from landfills and is recycling 29 percent of its plastic packaging. This doesn't sound that impressive until you consider that it's an average figure that includes the recycling rates of countries with still dismal records, such as Greece, which recovers scarcely 10 percent of its waste, in addition to places such as Germany and Denmark, which are closing in on 100 percent recovery of packaging waste. Sweden recycles 80 percent of its PET bottles, thanks to the equivalent of a national bottle bill.

It's worth noting that a large portion of the used plastic Europe recovers is burned to make heat or electricity, a technology known as waste-to-energy. There are about four hundred waste-to-energy plants scattered across the continent, and the EU counts what they do as recycling, which is why many European countries boast such enviably high recycling rates. Because landfill space is in such critically short supply, environmental concerns about the plants have gained little political traction. In the United States—where there's room to continue the debate, so to speak—there are only 87 waste-to-energy plants, most on the congested East Coast, and no new ones have been built since the mid-1990s. Yet as plastic packaging increasingly comes under fire, leaders in the plastics industry have begun advocating for such technology as a way to deal with plastic waste.

In addition to spurring recycling efforts, the EPR laws have galvanized manufacturers and brand owners to make significant changes in their packages. They are using less material and eliminating unnecessary packaging—no more toothpaste tubes in cardboard boxes, fewer packages made of rarely recycled materials, such as PVC, and more refillables and concentrates. There's also much wider use of refillable bottles—glass as well as PET—which studies have shown have the lightest environmental impact.
The Green Dot law cut packaging consumption in Germany by 7 percent in its first four years, during which time, it's been estimated, U.S. packaging consumption increased by 13 percent.

The idea of EPR is spreading. More than thirty countries have packaging take-back laws,
and many have followed Europe's example by passing laws that require producer responsibility for hazardous materials, such as mercury, and for some products, such as electronics and cars. The United States has long been a holdout on demanding producer responsibility, but that is starting to change. At least twenty-four states have enacted producer-responsibility laws covering electronic waste, and places as diverse as Florida, Minnesota, Indiana, and Maine are developing laws requiring producers to step up and take responsibility for the disposal of products such as unused pharmaceuticals, mercury thermometers, thermostats, and lamps. In California, Vermont, Oregon, and Rhode Island, the EPR concept is being embraced as a general principle guiding waste policy.
The organization Sheehan heads, the Product Policy Institute, has established several product-stewardship councils—groups of policymakers, activists, and businesspeople who work on promoting EPR policies and laws—in California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New York, and Texas (as well as British Columbia). "Not only is it sweeping state legislatures," he said. "Industry is taking this very seriously."

Even without the explicit prod of EPR legislation, a growing number of companies are looking for ways to reduce their packaging footprints. What's good for the planet, many have realized, is also good for the bottom line. One forum for such efforts is the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, an organization created by architect William McDonough to implement some of the ideas laid out in his 2002 manifesto for industrial change
Cradle to Cradle.
In that book, McDonough and coauthor Michael Braungart argued that waste is a sign of fundamental unsustainability. Nature, they pointed out, "operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolism in which there is no such thing as waste." They used the example of a cherry tree. The tree produces blossoms and fruit, and though many fall to the ground, they are not useless there. They provide food for birds and insects and microorganisms, and they enrich the soil. In natural systems, "Waste equals food. This cyclical, cradle-to-cradle biological system has nourished a planet of thriving, diverse abundance for millions of years."
Human manufacturing, they argued, should operate the same way, so that all the things we make and the byproducts that are generated can be cycled back into either the metabolism of industry or nature.

That principle is the motivating spirit of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. The group comprises more than a hundred of the world's leading materials manufacturers, packaging companies, consumer products companies, retailers, and waste haulers, including Dow, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Apple, Dell, Starbucks, Procter and Gamble, and, of course, Walmart, which has shaken the global supply chain with its measures to dramatically reduce packaging waste. The group meets quarterly to share ideas, strategies, and the challenges of designing cradle-to-cradle packaging.

I attended one of its meetings, and after observing the official presentations and the hallway conversations, I realized just how complicated its goal can be. For starters, consider packaging's many purposes: keeping food fresh, protecting contents from damage, deterring theft, and, of course, enticing shoppers, among other things. Any of those factors can be affected when you start tinkering with the way a product is packaged. "I can take all the packaging off food and within a month I'll see food waste double" because the food will go bad, said Helen Roberts of Britain's big-box store chain Marks and Spencer in one session. Or, as a representative of Procter and Gamble observed in another session, consumers may not understand or share your goals. The company recognizes that small bottles of concentrate are environmentally preferable but they are a tough sell because shoppers still have a "primal" sense that "bigger is better." In another session, someone from Earthbound Farms, the country's biggest supplier of organic greens, described the company's efforts to use packaging that is as earth-friendly as its products. The company had taken pains to make sure that the clamshell containers used to protect delicate produce that was being transported around the country were made of PET, a recyclable plastic. Still the Earthbound Farms rep looked dismayed when a woman attendee—who was clearly not a packaging professional—stood up in the back, radiating anger. I want you to know, she announced, "I've made a personal decision not to buy your lettuce because it's in plastic!"

Even the environmental imperatives of sustainability can be difficult to reconcile. Take the example of the juice boxes and soup boxes, which began appearing on store shelves in the 1990s.
From an energy perspective, the packages are very efficient. They use less material and are more lightweight than cans or even plastic bottles. They take up less space in boxes and pallets and last longer on the shelf. Those kinds of efficiencies fit squarely within several of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition criteria for a sustainable package. But juice boxes are such complicated sandwiches of plastic, metal, and paper that they cannot be recycled, which clashes with another criterion of sustainability. In today's world, there are no perfect choices; all we can do is be aware of the tradeoffs. As SPC staffer Anne Bedarf noted, "There's no such thing as a sustainable material or package." There's only an ongoing journey to improved sustainability.

The empty twenty-ounce Diet Coke bottle sitting on my desk is, in many ways, a reflection of that journey and its challenges. Coca-Cola has been concerned with the environmental impact of its packaging for decades, said Scott Vitters, the company's sustainable-packaging guru.
Vitters, who has worked for Coca-Cola since 1997, is a resource wonk, prone to talking in almost impenetrable sustainability-speak: "Our objective is how do we maximize the contribution of packaging to economic, environmental, and social sustainability through preventing and eliminating waste across the entire product value chain." Translation: packaging waste costs the company money and goodwill. So Coca-Cola looks for ways to reduce the amount of materials that go into its packages and then tries to ensure that its packages aren't wasted. To that end, said Vitters, it's been a longtime adherent of the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Indeed, it has made a public commitment to achieving zero waste.

Compared to the PET bottle that Nathaniel Wyeth introduced, the bottles Coca-Cola and other beverage makers use today are significantly lightened and streamlined. The family-sized bottles have lost the flat-bottomed high-density polyethylene base that marked the original ones; it was a pain for recyclers. The bottle walls have been thinned, allowing them to be made with a third less plastic. The labels are now smaller and affixed with adhesive that is easier to remove, to improve recyclability. And even the caps have been shortened, decreasing the amount of plastic needed by 5 percent, for a savings of forty million pounds of plastic a year. "It adds up quickly," said Vitters. That twenty-ounce Diet Coke bottle I've got in front of me is the lightest PET soda bottle on the market.
Other packages, such as its Dasani water bottles, have also been light-weighted, reducing the amount of plastic used by a hundred million pounds a year.

Indeed, the Dasani bottle is one of Vitters's proudest achievements. Coca-Cola designers were planning to launch Dasani in a dark blue bottle until he pointed out that the dark tint would make the bottle unrecyclable, since PET reclaimers need colorless material. They decided instead on a much lighter shade. The caps were also made to be more easily recycled. "Every aspect of that package was designed for end of life," he said. Coca-Cola Japan accomplished a similar feat with a super-lightweight bottle for its recently introduced line of bottled water I LOHAS (for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability): a container so minimal it can be crushed into a twelve-gram wad of plastic, nearly half the weight of any other PET water bottle.
Of course, it's not quite clear how the product inside that feather-light bottle fits into a true Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability, given the energy that goes into bottling and selling a substance that most consumers can enjoy from their home faucet for a fraction of the cost. (And let's not even get started on the health and environmental sustainability of Coke's main product.) Such are the paradoxes of sustainable packaging.

Coca-Cola pioneered the use of bottles with recycled content in 1991, but it's followed through with more consistency in other countries, especially those with strict EPR laws. Globally, the company has sought to ensure that the resin used in its bottles contains at least 10 percent recycled content, but in many places the recycled content is as high as 25 or even 50 percent. Despite promises the company made in the early 1990s, the recycled content of bottles sold in the United States remains, at most, 5 to 10 percent. (Those rates apply to the resin used to make the bottles, not the amount of recycled content contained in each bottle.) Vitters said one reason U.S. bottles have lower amounts of recycled content is the difficulty of collecting used bottles in this country (the very problem that could be addressed by more deposit laws).