THE DRIVE FOR 2025: What are the Options for Recycling Barrier Packaging?

The flexible packaging industry continues to invest resources in order to develop product and market solutions that will align with the 2025 recyclable packaging objectives laid out by industry leaders. There are many challenges to overcome but I believe our entire industry has become broad-minded and stronger as a result of our learnings and diligence as we drive forward to meet the goals of 2025.  We have also seen mounting frustration as the amount of work and effort is not yielding the progress we are all looking for, particularly for barrier and metallized solutions in all PE structures. It is easy to get wrapped up in developing barrier solutions at the front end of our supply chain as companies engineer resin, film, and converting solutions that allow us to produce high barrier recyclable packaging solutions. However, these solutions only get us to the “recycle ready” stage.  We must also be aware of the end-of-life options for these packages, which is necessary to consider when identifying a package as “recyclable” or not.  There are many industry initiatives underway right now to develop recycling streams for these high barrier packages1.  A few of the larger-scale initiatives are listed here: Materials Recovery for the Future in North America and CEFLEX in Europe have been focusing on developing marking and sortation technology to more […]

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Swimming up the Recycling Stream

Store Drop-Off is the only recyclability option for flexible packaging at scale in North America today. The How2Recycle® team has been working on many aspects of testing, including anything added or applied onto a standard, base PE film.  The How2Recycle team is also working hard resolving the uncertainties surrounding metallized film and recyclability.

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