Every year, Americans bury an estimated two million tons or more of used clay cat litter — clay that was strip-mined from the ground, trucked across the country, scooped once, used by a cat, and thrown away. It does not biodegrade, so it sits in the landfill essentially forever. And that is just the cat.
Pets belong to the household waste stream, even though we rarely add them to the tally. About 94 million U.S. households keep a pet, and the roughly 68 million dogs and 49 million cats among them, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2025 survey, generate three large and mostly invisible waste streams: cat litter, dog waste and the bags that carry it, and the packaging that food and treats arrive in. Each one carries a cost at the kitchen counter and a much larger one at the national scale.
The Clay Nobody Thinks About
Conventional clumping litter is sodium bentonite, a clay valued for the way it seals around moisture. Getting it out of the ground means strip mining, and industry estimates put U.S. clay mined for litter at roughly five billion pounds a year. A single cat works through about 28 pounds of clay litter a month — close to 336 pounds a year — and none of it breaks down once discarded.
The household cost is real too. Litter runs roughly $180 to $480 a year for one cat, and multi-cat homes multiply that spending into the thousands of dollars annually. Spread across roughly 49 million cats, litter alone is a multi-billion-dollar annual purchase, a recurring spend on a product whose useful life is measured in days and whose afterlife is measured in centuries.
Plant-based alternatives, such as corn, wheat, walnut sshells, recycled paper, or and even tofu, cut the mining and landfill burden, though they vary in price, dustiness, and clumping performance. The table below compares the common options on the dimensions that matter for waste.
Litter type
Made from
End of life
Waste trade-off
Clay (clumping)
Strip-mined sodium bentonite
Landfill; does not biodegrade
Highest mining and landfill footprint
Silica crystal
Mined silica gel
Landfill; inert
Lighter per use, but still mined and landfilled
Plant-based (corn, wheat, wood, paper, tofu)
Renewable crops or recycled fiber
Compostable in principle — but not with cat feces
Lowest extraction footprint; disposal still constrained by Toxoplasma risk
One caution applies across every type: cat feces can carry Toxoplasma gondii, so even a compostable litter should never be flushed or composted for a food garden.
A Million Bags a Day
America’s dogs produce an estimated 10.6 million tons of waste a year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each dog generates about three-quarters of a pound a day and classifies pet waste as a nonpoint source of pollution. Left on the ground, it washes into storm drains, carrying pathogens and the nutrients that fuel algae blooms downstream
Then there is the bag. A study in the journal Environmental Pollution estimated that dog waste bags amount to roughly 415 billion worldwide each year, the equivalent of 0.76 to 1.23 million tons of plastic waste. Standard plastic bags can persist in a landfill for centuries, so the daily ritual of picking up after a dog quietly builds an enormous, near-permanent plastic stockpile that goes to landfills.
“Compostable” and “biodegradable” labels muddy the picture. Most municipal composting programs will not accept dog waste, so certified-compostable bags usually end up in the same trash stream as plastic bags, where landfill conditions do not break them down. In short, the label promises an outcome that the disposal system rarely delivers.
The disposal options that reduce harm are narrower than the marketing suggests. Flushing pet-safe waste, where local rules and septic systems allow it, routes the material to wastewater treatment rather than the landfill. In-ground pet-waste digesters can break down waste on-site for homeowners with yard space. Bagging and trashing remains the default for apartment dwellers, in which case a thin conventional bag and a premium compostable bag are typically sent to the same landfill.
The culprit is multilayer flexible packaging — pouches, treat bags, and kibble bags that fuse plastic, foil, and film into a single barrier that curbside systems cannot separate. Only about 2% of U.S. households have curbside access for film and flexible packaging, according to the Recycling Partnership, and material tossed in the wrong bin tangles sorting equipment at recovery facilities.
The picture is shifting. As of October 1, 2025, seven states had enacted comprehensive packaging extended producer responsibility laws — California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — that move recycling costs onto producers. These regulations are already nudging brands toward easier-to-recycle mono-material bags. Store drop-off film programs and mail-in services for pouches and treat bags can fill some of the gap, but have not gained sufficient traction to make a substantial difference.
What You Can Do
Litter:
Switch to a plant-based litter, such as corn, wheat, walnut, or recycled paper, where it works for your cat, to cut both mining and landfill volume.
Buy larger packages to reduce packaging per pound, and scoop daily rather than dumping the whole box to stretch each batch. Never flush cat waste or compost it for edibles because of the Toxoplasma risk.
Dog waste:
Treat “compostable” bag claims with skepticism unless you have a pet-waste digester or a municipal program that actually accepts dog waste; otherwise, the bag and the waste both go to landfill.
Always pick up. Pet waste is a documented water pollutant, not fertilizer.
Packaging:
Check store drop-off bins for clean film, and use mail-in programs for pouches and treat bags. Look up local options with Earth911’s recycling search.
Favor brands moving to mono-material recyclable bags, and support packaging EPR laws that are already reshaping what shows up on the shelf.
When it comes to morel mushrooms, I’ve spent more time looking than finding. Far more. With that in mind, I wasn’t optimistic when I wandered out this spring to check last year’s burn area for morels.
Fifty acres burned last September.
Local lore says that morels grow exceptionally well the first year after a fire. Burn scar morels grow in relationship with conifers lying dormant in the soil for decades, just waiting for this opportunity. The fire removes competition and feeds the soil, creating a nutrient-rich environment for the morel mycelium to fruit. With last summer’s fire so close, it’s easy for me to check it out.
As I enter the burn scar, there are no mushrooms on the first south-facing slope: no morels, no little brown mushrooms, nothing. I’m not surprised. Three-quarters of the way along the next slope, I see one. The tiniest little morel I’ve ever seen. Just the size of my thumbnail. I note the location and move on, excited that I was able to find one so small.
A few paces further, a pair is pushing next to a boulder. I will come back to this spot after a day or two of warm spring sunshine. The soil has to warm to about 50° for morels to start fruiting. That usually requires a combination of days in the 60s and nights in the 40s. It’s not been that warm at night yet.
Around the side of this same hill, the ground is covered with stalked bonfire mushrooms. Where they grow in the char, morels are likely to be. And there they are – tiny ones, but the more I look, the more I find.
My husband says, “They’re so small, how do you even find them?!?” Enthusiastically, I replied “I’ve been training my whole life for this!”
So now I know they really are there, and they prefer the pine needle-covered charred earth. I go back two warm days later. There are more, but still too small. Another two days and another doubling of the wrinkly coneheads pushing up.
And then, it rains.
This is just the thing to make them explode! I go back and fill my basket. Mushrooms have never tasted so good!
If you’re interested in purchasing or licensing any images you see here, please email me at SNewenham at exploringnaturephotos.com, and I’ll make it happen.
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Glass Imaging's impressive GlassAI Neural image signal processing (ISP) technology is heavily featured in the brand-new Honor 600 smartphone, promising to improve the zoom photography experience on the fancy new phone.
About one in four items Americans put in recycling bins does not belong there. This good-intentioned mistake leads to equipment damage, higher processing costs, contaminated bales that buyers reject, and injuries to workers who have to remove these items from conveyor belts.
Recyclers call this hopeful but mistaken behavior wishcycling. This means putting a questionable item in the blue bin and hoping the facility will sort it out. Most facilities cannot do this, and the cost of trying has gone up sharply. An August 2024 EPA assessment estimates that the country needs $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030 to modernize a recycling system strained by contamination. Understanding what wishcycling actually costs, and who pays for it, is the first step to stopping it.
What is Wishcycling?
Wishcycling is the practice of putting items into a recycling bin when you’re not sure they’re accepted, hoping the system will sort it out.
The term appeared around 2015 and is attributed to Bill Keegan, president of Dem-Con Companies, a Shakopee, Minnesota waste and recycling operator. Star Tribune columnist Eric Roper revisited the term in a 2017 follow-up documenting industry efforts to coordinate recycling education across haulers and municipalities. The behavior is older than the word. Bowling balls, garden hoses, propane tanks, and Christmas lights have been arriving at material recovery facilities (MRFs) for decades.
The main change has been the cost. In the early 2000s, U.S. MRFs accepted fewer types of materials and sent most contaminated materials overseas in bales.
After China’s National Sword policy took effect in 2018, the global market for dirty recycling collapsed. Research from the University at Buffalo found that the amount of plastic landfilled in the U.S. increased by 23.2% in the year China’s import bans began to take effect. Processors now have to clean material to a much higher standard if they want to export it, or pay to landfill it themselves.
The Contamination Numbers Have Stayed Stubbornly High
National contamination figures vary by methodology and region, but the picture is consistent: a meaningful fraction of every recycling load is material that shouldn’t be there. Industry estimates put the share of items placed in residential bins that are not actually recyclable at around 25%, with municipalities reporting rates from below 10% to above 40% depending on local rules and education. Waste Management, the country’s largest hauler, reported its average inbound contamination at just over 17% in recent years, down from a longer-running 25% average, which represents progress, but is still well above the under-5% threshold most end markets demand.
Capture rates tell the other half of the story. The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling report found that only 21% of U.S. residential recyclable material is actually recycled. Roughly 76% is thrown out by households as ordinary trash, and another 3% is lost at the MRF, where contamination, broken glass, and unsortable mixed material wash out of the system before it can be baled and sold.
In other words, most recyclables never make it to a recycler. The ones that do often come with extra items like pizza grease, plastic bags, garden hoses, food residue, batteries, or propane canisters, which compromise the load.
What Contamination Costs the System
Wishcycling affects the finances of every part of the recycling process.
At the MRF, processing a ton of single-stream mixed recyclables cost $129 per ton in Oregon in 2022, according to a Crowe LLP audit cited in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2025 review of U.S. recycling. The same review says that after the National Sword contamination restrictions, Waste Management’s processing costs went up by about 15%, or roughly $13 per ton, across its 43 single-stream facilities. These costs include extra labor, optical sorters, screens, and slower processing when machines jam.
At the end of the process, contaminated bales sell for less, get downgraded, or are rejected completely. When a load is rejected, the MRF has to pay the landfill tipping fee instead of making a sale. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation’s 2024 tipping fee analysis puts the national average at $62.28 per ton, a 10% increase from 2023, which is the biggest year-over-year jump since 2022. In the Northeast, the average is even higher, around $80 per ton.
At the public level, municipalities and producers end up paying the bill. Oregon’s new producer responsibility program, which started in mid-2025, includes a contamination management fee that producers pay to MRFs. The fee is $341 per ton of eligible material for 2025 and 2026, rising to $432 in 2027. This shows that regulators recognize contamination has a cost, and that someone besides the MRF operator should pay for it.
The EPA’s August 2024 Recycling Infrastructure Assessment estimates that bringing U.S. recycling infrastructure up to a level that gives every household access to recycling on par with trash collection would require $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030. That figure covers MRFs, packaging-specific recycling facilities, drop-off infrastructure, and composting and anaerobic digestion capacity. Reducing contamination is built into the agency’s assumptions; cleaner inputs are a precondition for the recovery gains the investment is meant to unlock.
The Human Cost: Recycling Workers Are Getting Hurt
Contamination is not just an economic problem. Items that do not belong in the recycling stream, such as propane tanks, lithium-ion batteries, medical sharps, broken glass, and plastic bags that tangle in screens, make sorting recyclables physically dangerous.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in January 2026 show that the injury rate for solid waste collection workers rose to 5.0 cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers in 2024, up from 4.3 in 2023 and 4.7 in 2022. Workers at material recovery facilities were injured at a rate of 5.8 per 100 FTE — the highest the agency has reported for that category since at least 2020. For comparison, the rate across all private industry in 2024 was 2.3 per 100 FTE, the lowest since 2003. Sorting recycling is more than twice as dangerous as the average American job.
Fatalities show an even more serious side. The BLS counted eight MRF deaths in 2024, down from nine the year before, and 32 fatal injuries among solid waste collection workers, with 23 linked to transportation incidents. In 2024, refuse and recyclable material collection was the fifth-deadliest job in the country, behind only logging, fishing and hunting, roofing, and structural ironworking.
Lithium-ion batteries deserve a separate line. They are routinely placed in curbside recycling bins by residents who don’t know where else to put them, and they routinely catch fire when crushed by compactor trucks or sorting equipment. A 2024 report from the National Waste & Recycling Association and Resource Recycling Systems estimates more than 5,000 fires occur annually at U.S. recycling facilities, with the rate of catastrophic losses up 41% over the previous five years. The cost of insuring an MRF has climbed accordingly, driving recycling costs for citizens higher.
Why Wishcycling Persists
Three structural problems keep contamination rates high.
First, recycling rules are set locally, but packaging is made for the whole country. For example, a yogurt cup accepted in Seattle might be sent to landfill in Atlanta. The chasing arrows symbol and resin identification codes 1 through 7 show the type of plastic, not whether it can be recycled locally. According to a 2020 McKinsey survey cited in the National Academies’ 2025 report, two-thirds of U.S. consumers are confused by this difference.
Second, single-stream collection is convenient for residents and trucks, but it results in dirtier loads compared to dual- or multi-stream systems. Most U.S. municipal recycling programs now use single-stream collection, and the convenience that made it popular also allows more contamination.
Third, people often feel a strong moral urge to recycle, which can lead them to ignore instructions. A National Academies survey found that 78% of consumers check product labels to sort products correctly, and 82% trust the information on those labels. When labels are wrong or misleading, good intentions turn into contamination.
What You Can Do
Reducing wishcycling begins with individual choices at the bin, but it is most effective when combined with changes at the system level.
At the household level:
Look up your local recycling guidelines and post them where you sort. Use the Earth911 recycling search by ZIP code and material to find what’s accepted near you.
When in doubt, throw it out. One contaminated item can devalue an entire bale. A landfilled item costs the system less than a wishcycled one that has to be pulled out twice and sent to landfill anyway.
Follow four common-sense rules: keep recyclables empty, clean, dry, and loose. Do not bag recyclables. Do not leave food residue. Avoid putting in items that tangle, such as hoses, cords, string lights, or plastic bags.
Never put batteries, propane cylinders, electronics, or hazardous waste in curbside bins. Use a dedicated drop-off location. Most counties have hazardous waste collection days, and many retailers accept batteries.
Treat plastic bags and film separately. Most municipal MRFs can’t process them; grocery stores and big-box retailers often have collection bins for them at the entrance.
At the community and policy level:
Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that shift the cost of packaging recyclability onto the companies that produce it. Several states have packaging EPR laws on the books; Oregon’s took effect in mid-2025.
Ask local officials whether your municipality publishes contamination data and whether it audits MRF inbound loads. Cities that measure tend to manage.
Push back on misleading recyclability labels. The Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing its Green Guides since 2022 but has not yet issued an update; public attention has been one of the main forces keeping the review going.
Wishcycling happens when good intentions meet a system that cannot handle them. The solution is not to try less, but to focus your efforts: learn what your program accepts, follow the rules even if it feels wasteful, and speak up about the policies that decide what gets made and labeled.in place.
The workers who sort our recyclables, the cities that pay for processing, and the bales that decide if material becomes a new product all depend on one thing: what you put in the bin.
Editor’s Note: Originally published on January 11, 2017, this article was substantially updated in June 2026.
Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won’t try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.
Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical’s Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada’s Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald’s extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can’t find another bag in the store that’s labeled the same way.
The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California’s SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.
To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Every year, Americans buy roughly 5 billion pounds of fresh produce that’s packaged in flexible plastic — that’s salads, carrots, potatoes, lots of produce. That packaging extends shelf life, reducing food waste, but most of it is made from virgin polyethylene refined from fossil fuels, and almost none of it gets recycled.
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging for the U.S. produce industry. And on December 11 of 2025, Emerald announced a significant milestone: that over the previous year, the company had replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, as you’ll probably hear it in this discussion.
That shift — granted that it’s only a million fewer pounds of plastic packaging in a vast sea of it — is a suggestion of what’s possible in food packaging. However, getting recycled plastic approved for direct food contact isn’t simple. Produce packaging is especially demanding, because shelf life and food safety are not negotiable. The FDA requires rigorous testing to ensure that no contaminants from that PCR migrate into food, and for years, the industry defaulted to virgin plastic because recycled content couldn’t meet those standards reliably at scale.
Emerald is working to change that equation. In collaboration with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, amongst others, they’ve introduced the first 30% post-consumer recycled materials potato bag approved for food contact, and Emerald’s initiative supports Walmart’s Project Gigaton, which aims to eliminate 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the retailer’s supply chain by 2030. Emerald has also partnered with D’Arrigo, the company behind Andy Boy produce, to introduce another 30% PCR bag for romaine lettuce hearts — and that’s a shift that has removed over 600,000 pounds of virgin plastic from the supply chain between June 2023 and 2025.
Emerald is a third-generation, family-owned company based in Union City, California. Kevin brings the perspective of an organization that has operated through six decades of rapid, often revolutionary changes in how Americans buy and consume food. He’s led the company through its evolution from a regional bag manufacturer to becoming an industry leader, pushing the boundaries of sustainable, flexible packaging.
So we’re going to talk with Kevin about what it took to get recycled content into food contact packaging at scale, whether grocery customers are willing to pay more for sustainable options, how California’s recent SB 54 packaging law is reshaping the industry, and whether flexible packaging can ever become truly circular when most curbside programs still don’t accept it. You can learn more about Emerald Packaging at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Empack.com.
Can recycled content packaging go from future milestone to mainstream reality? Let’s find out, right after this. Welcome to the show, Kevin. How you doing today?
Kevin Kelly (3:33)
I’m doing great. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe (3:35)
I’m well, I’m well. Thanks for asking, and thanks for joining us. We’ve been working to get together for a few months now, and I’m glad that we actually now have the opportunity to complete the conversation. I’ve shared a summary of Emerald Packaging’s recent activity in my introduction, but could you share the backstory? When did your grandfather start the company?
Kevin Kelly (3:52)
It was actually my father. He started it in 1963 with three partners. They were based in Berkeley, California, and they mainly made — not produce packaging, which is what we specialize in now — they were making bread bags, because they were in the bread district. They were unionized by the bread workers’ union. It was a very different company when they started out. It also had one printing press and two bag machines.
Today, we have 32 bag-making machines, seven printing presses, and I don’t know how many other machines, and about 250 employees. It became a family business in ’93, and then gradually the other siblings retired, and I’m the last one here. So we’ve got a wonderful staff behind us — very creative, very technical, and best of all, they’re very detailed, which I’m not, which is why we’ve been having problems getting together for a couple of months.
Mitch Ratcliffe (4:52)
Tell me, how has the company changed since you’ve been involved with it? Obviously you just described a massive transition. But why the sustainability focus? When did that take hold?
Kevin Kelly (5:05)
Well, I started worrying about sustainability and packaging back in 2000, believe it or not, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board did a study of what was in landfills, and it turned out that plastic was a lot of what was in landfills, especially the ground covering that the agricultural industry uses in their growing operations. And so we started, with a bunch of California companies back then, having a conversation with the American Chemistry Council, which I can’t stand — I’m just going to be upfront about it — about creating a recycling system in California, because you could tell in the early 2000s this moment was coming. I mean, maybe it was a distant moment, but it was coming.
And the ACC told us absolutely not. The resin companies wanted nothing to do with fees. So really, back then, a bunch of small plastics companies in California couldn’t do anything if the ACC wouldn’t let us do anything. They had that much influence amongst both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
And so from there, I was sort of an orphan for a long time, you know — trying this, trying that. Worked with potato-based films, worked with PLA, polylactic acid. Tried different approaches. And then finally, a few years ago, post-consumer recycled resin became, I think, more affordable. It’s still about three times, four times the cost of virgin resin, but blended with virgin resin, I thought it was an affordable option now.
Trying to get people to buy anything that they can’t pass on — what a lot of people don’t know is that CPGs have year-long contracts with retailers, and there’s no causes for price increases, including acts of war, acts of God, supply disruption. So a lot of these companies are getting killed right now, but that’s another story for another day. They have no way to really pass on increases. And Walmart’s always said, we want sustainable packaging — we want it for free. They don’t say free; they say we want it for the same price as what we’re paying right now, which I take to mean free. They’ve gotten a little bit better in that stance, by the way, but there was really no way to pass things on.
So finally, in 2023, I just said, damn it. I’ve been working on this issue in one form or another for most of my career in packaging. I’m just going to do it. And so we convinced a customer to take their entire line and put 30% PCR in it, and we ate the cost of it. That was about 400,000 pounds of PCR right there. And from there, we attracted the interest of other companies. Some companies have taken surcharges, but PCR has really become our thrust at this point.
We’re still working with a lot of compostable options — in other words, experimenting — because at 5x, 6x, 7x, 10x, it’s still a very difficult proposition for most companies to take on. Companies with big margins, or specialty companies that don’t have year-long contracts, they have a little bit more leeway in this area, I think. But compostables remain — I’m not going to call it a pipe dream, because I’m feeling like the extended producer responsibility programs are making it more feasible — but they’re just not there yet.
Mitch Ratcliffe (8:39)
You’ve removed more than a million pounds of virgin plastic from your supply chain so far with recycled material, and that’s just within the last couple of years. How did you have to change the company to embrace the PCR process and address customer concerns about food safety?
Kevin Kelly (8:57)
Well, those are two great questions. I’ll break it down on a couple of different levels. Internally, when you’re the CEO of a family-run business and you say, hey, let’s go do this, people tend to start going and doing it. And there was a great deal of enthusiasm amongst the troops anyway about taking on a real project and commercializing it. So within the company, there wasn’t much opposition.
Now, Kevin walking into a room and saying, hey, there’s this really great technology — there’s a company, Circulus, that’s got an operation out in the Central Valley of California, about two hours away — let’s start working with them. Well, then my poor Director of Operations, Michael Rincon, has to make it happen. And PCR is an animal all its own. In terms of production runs, there’s a lot of variation within loads, for instance — not just between loads, but within. It causes a lot of carbon buildup on the extrusion lines, and so you have to shut down and clean them every eight hours. There’s much greater waste because of the variation within the loads, and so on and so forth. So we had a lot of learning on the production side in order to make this happen. We’re still learning.
But the other piece there has been the inconsistency amongst suppliers. Everybody talks about recycling and packaging, and yet you go to recycling conferences, and all you hear and all you really read about are the financial problems of recycling companies. The end markets really still aren’t there for them. In the case of PET, they’re competing with overseas supply that’s much cheaper. And so getting a consistent source as one company after the other goes out of business has been tough. So that’s been a challenge.
Our customers — they took us at our word that it was safe. They wanted to see what the process for ensuring that it was food-grade PCR was, you know — what were our certifications, what were the certifications of our suppliers, and then how did we trace within loads? Because the last thing you want is food-grade mixing with non-food-grade.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:18)
You make this point already, and it was a question I wanted to dig into a bit, which is: with PCR, the sources are very mixed. Where does the feedstock come from? Is it from previously used film, or are we talking about other sources as well?
Kevin Kelly (11:33)
No, you’re talking, in the case of food-grade — you’re talking previously sourced film for, you know, plastic wrap around pallets. It’s not the salad bag that’s being brought back to the store and the store drop-off thing.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:51)
And so this is largely a procurement management issue for you. And do you do a lot of testing of the material you get, or is this something that you take as certified? And is there a certification that you can rely on?
Kevin Kelly (12:04)
Well, I think that’s been one of the problems. You have this sort of nebulous process where a company that is making food-grade PCR — it’s nebulous. It just sounds strange. It’s not what I’m used to. When I’m used to certifications, they go to the FDA, they submit samples, they submit their process, and the FDA will come back and say — give you what’s called a letter of no objection, which hardly sounds like an endorsement, a stamp of approval. It’s like, we got no objection. So I think that process really actually has to be cleaned up.
There has to be some way — the Biodegradable Products Institute, there has to be some way of certifying companies and periodic testing that goes beyond us testing our incoming material. We’re a $90 million company. We have the ability to do some testing, and we do, but really we’re relying on Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals to do what they say they’re doing, which is sourcing pallet wrap, washing it, washing it again, drying it, repelletizing it, drying it again, to drive out any impurities. So it is a difficult process. We have to have possession from them of the chain going all the way back to the source, but that’s a lot of documentation, and I think that’s where companies have come to rely on mass balance. But mass balance doesn’t tell you anything about food-grade, non-food-grade, and it’s also, of course, been manipulated by companies in ways that have undermined a process that could otherwise be helpful.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:58)
Thinking about what you just said — is a transparency movement needed in order for PCR materials to be truly understood, both by the manufacturer who’s going to use the material and the consumer in the long run? Do we need that kind of full life cycle accounting to be available to say this plastic has gone through these steps, so people have confidence about the food safety issues?
Kevin Kelly (14:22)
I think so. I’m trying to imagine in my head how we would do that. That’s why there’s people smarter and greater than I involved in these things. But I think some way of tracing back, or some way of testing, or more periodic testing. Or, for instance, you could say, Emerald Packaging, you have to test your material 10, 15 times a year, submit, and it has to be done. You know, actually, that doesn’t work. I’m trying to think of a way you could possibly do it, you know, so that it’s absolutely ironclad. I’m going to say, I don’t quite know how you would do it, but I would frankly prefer that, because I know I’m making all efforts to use food-grade PCR, right? We’re documenting, we’re maintaining all of our documentation, and we’re working only with suppliers that we’ve gone and visited and certified ourselves.
There are other companies, especially at the beginning when we came out, who were saying — you can make a plastic that has three to five layers in it, right? You’re using one plastic on the surface, something in the middle, and another plastic on the surface. And they would say, well, we’re using PCR; it doesn’t have to be food-grade, because we’re putting it in the middle. You know, that protects it. And the company buying — particularly, say, in the produce industry — who aren’t educated in these things might think that that sounds reasonable. It’s not, of course, because whatever you put in the middle migrates to the surface. So if you’ve got contaminants in the damn thing, you know they’re going to get out of the middle eventually and end up on the surface, and then end up on the food.
And so we had to do a lot of customer education about what they had to get from their supplier in order for them to be reasonably certain that they were using food-grade PCR versus just any old derelict PCR that came from materials that are fine in a garbage bag, but not fine touching food. That education process largely then fell on us. I think we’re so early in this — I, you know, frankly, haven’t been able to find another bag or package in the store that says it uses food-grade PCR. We’re sort of like the canary in the coal mine. A lot of what one might hope would be coming from an industry organization, or the FDA, or a California certifying government body, or a government body that would be checking, you know, whether things were food-grade or not — randomly off the store shelf — all that’s fallen on us.
Mitch Ratcliffe (17:18)
That’s a huge undertaking, and I can understand now why it’s three or four times more expensive to use this material. How did you make the case to Wada Farms or D’Arrigo that this was a good choice? Was it a sustainable, moral suasion argument, or was it a consumers-are-going-to-love-you-for-this? How did you bring them on board?
Kevin Kelly (17:39)
For me, it starts with: this is a great way to make your packaging more sustainable. It starts with the moral argument that I always begin with — that, because that’s where I come from. I know one should be thinking about these things as huge marketing opportunities, and they are, I suppose. But for me, it’s really about: what can packaging do to move the needle on becoming more environmentally friendly? You know, I guess that just comes out of familial commitment, having to look your kids in the eye and tell them you’re actually doing something versus not. And so I always begin the conversation there.
And then I go to the marketing question — consumers will love it. And, oh, by the way, you know, Walmart has a program — that they’ve revised somewhat — but they have a program really emphasizing post-consumer resin in Walmart brand. And so this is something that will please Walmart, especially if the upcharge is very small or there’s no upcharge at all. And in the case of Wada Farms, that’s the sale they really took to Walmart. And whoever the purchasing person at Walmart on the other end was knew about the Walmart program, was committed to the Walmart program, and so jumped on the opportunity. That doesn’t always happen, but they did, and they saw it both, I think, as an internal possibility to fulfill an internal commitment to the environment, but also a way to market potatoes to consumers using packaging that was more environmentally friendly.
Mitch Ratcliffe (19:27)
If we don’t make this transition, what’s the outcome for the economy in the long term? Do we essentially choke ourselves on our waste? How do you envision the benefits of the sustainable packaging movement alleviating the crisis that we’re entering?
Kevin Kelly (19:45)
I think that the crisis operates on many different levels, right? So let’s sort of back up a little bit. You have the greenhouse gas crisis, you have the waste crisis, and they intersect, obviously, but they’re two distinct things.
And so in the case of some packaging, I believe there’s an argument to be made that it actually does reduce food waste and therefore greenhouse gas. The State of Oregon looked at that question in 2017 in a little-known study that came back and said, in the balance, produce packaging, for instance, reduces greenhouse gas through reduction of food waste, food preservation, shelf life extension, more than it actually contributes to greenhouse gas in the production thereof. So there’s this single study floating out there that says that. It’s not true in the case of every kind of packaging.
You can certainly ask yourself — and I’m not going to get into this debate — whether we need Ho Hos and Twinkies or not, and whether we need them wrapped, therefore, to get them. So, you know, there is this question on the store shelves of where is packaging beneficial and where it isn’t.
I think PCR moves the needle a little. I think it tells you where we are in this process. When one turn of this is close to being circular, right? Maybe we’ve, like, rounded the bend — one of the hundreds of bends to go to actually form a complete circle. But it’s a start. I mean, which is the way, I guess, we sort of have to look at it.
If you’re over in my world, the thing about sustainable packaging, and I think this has been true for the last 20 years, is that the technologies exist today to take the entire packaging world into compostable packaging. We’d then be choking on compostable packaging. But, you know, we’d need a lot of home compost, obviously, to deal with billions of pounds of compostable packaging. I mean, the infrastructure doesn’t exist, so on and so forth. The point I’m making here is the technology has been there. The question throughout has been, who’s going to pay for it?
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:22)
I think this is an absolutely critical question, and one we hear about with the green premium. I want to dig into this, but we’re going to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned.
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:37)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue talking with Kevin Kelly. He is the CEO of Emerald Packaging in Union City, California, and we’re talking about the company’s investments in developing more sustainable food packaging options. Kevin, you mentioned that the flexible packaging recycling infrastructure in the United States is, let’s just say, still very limited. Most curbside programs don’t accept it. As you look at the material flow in your industry, are there new business opportunities in collection and processing that you see people missing, that they should be stepping into?
Kevin Kelly (23:12)
Well, I think you’re being generous when you say it’s limited. It’s virtually nonexistent, right? I mean, let’s be — the store drop-back, drop-off program is a nice — I don’t know, it’s nice, but imagine if everybody took their bags back to the store and Safeway became a solid waste dump. You know, it’d be a wake-up call to everybody.
But at any rate, I think there’s a big business opportunity in recycling, period. The issue has been on that end of things — the end markets. Okay? So you have recycled material. Where does it go? In a free market economy, you’re dealing with virgin material that’s cheaper than its recycled cousin. How do you create markets — not just create markets so that you attract capital into the recycling business, especially now where so many recyclers are going belly up because the end markets don’t exist and there’s too much competition for materials that can actually be used and resold? Which is true in the food-grade PCR business as well. I mean, how many loads of pallet wrap can you get out of a Walmart distribution center? There’s a lot of competition for what are called clean bales. They’re super expensive, and then you have to be able to turn around and sell that at a profit.
The perfect example is Circulus, which was a company that was created to make PCR, including food-grade PCR. They put a gorgeous facility in the Central Valley — some of the most sophisticated machinery I’ve ever seen in my life. And I love manufacturing lines. They put another one in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and they were going to put one in Georgia that I think they’re finally going ahead with. Was backed by venture capital — backed by a group out of Texas. And I think they looked at it as, wow, look at these EPR programs. There’s going to be a real opportunity here. And I’d say three years ago, I would have thought the same. They lasted about 18 months. And venture capital, private equity — which would be one source of capital in order to build out, you know, a private recycling system — recognized that they weren’t going to make any money soon. I always said I wanted to be the second or third owner of Circulus, because I was convinced, you know, within a few months of getting to know the market, that they were going to not make it, and that the private equity, which wants to see instantaneous returns, wasn’t going to be able to put up with the ups and downs of the current recycling system.
So they ended up selling out to Dow Chemical. You know, Dow Chemical has kept the operation going. They’ve put some money into it. They closed — I should say they closed the facility in central California. They kept the Ardmore facility going. They’re building the facility in Georgia. How much money will Dow put in to expand it? You know, they haven’t shown a great appetite to do so. The resin company that has probably put the most money in is Nova Chemicals, up in Canada, which sort of makes sense, because you have well-developed EPR programs in Canada, right? You have mandates around recycled material use in some provinces, and so Nova’s got a pretty good market just there in order to be able to sell the material.
Again, I think — you know, businesses sometimes don’t like to hear this, but the word “mandate” is going to be probably the savior of recycling in the United States, because governments mandating post-consumer resin use will drive a market and a viable one, because companies will have to actually use the material in order to hit the mandate.
Mitch Ratcliffe (27:35)
So with EPR laws taking off across the country — but particularly California’s SB 54, that requires a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 (so six years from now), and it has minimum recycled content thresholds in law as well. How has that changed the game? Are we moving in the right direction? Do you see that policy starting to come into place to put the weight behind the spear?
Kevin Kelly (28:02)
Good question. I think that SB 54 might actually do the opposite. Why? Because, in the original regulations, if a company used PCR, they were given a pound-for-pound credit against their fees. That got wiped out. And now, the overall program — if you get the mandate — is to reduce plastic use by 10%, the use of virgin plastic, by a certain date. I think it’s 2028. The low-hanging fruit there is, say, agricultural film, or something that is using a lot of plastic where you can use non-food-grade material all day long, and it doesn’t have to be widely used across the supply chain. 8% or 10% is an easy number to hit.
The fees themselves are small enough — believe it or not, even at, say, 60 cents a pound or 80 cents a pound for the worst sort of materials, mixed materials — that it doesn’t make sense to switch to food-grade PCR, which is still, you know — the differential before we went into the war was around $1.30 a pound between it and virgin material.
And so I think the regulation writers have to be more cognizant about the economics and the financial incentives that are being set, both within the fees and within the regulations themselves, in terms of using PCR or compostables as an offset. And one of the problems there — I think you get to the crux of this — is that there’s not a lot of conversation between all parties. The regulators aren’t talking — we’re just now starting, and, you know, it’s shame on both parties. We’re just now starting to talk to CAA, and we’re just now starting to talk to CalRecycle, and we’re really just now beginning to explain the economics of PCR within the structure of an EPR system. And I wish we had had these conversations a year, a year or two ago. It’s hard for CalRecycle to find us. It’s hard for us to find them in the mix. We’re small. I think we’ve come to more prominence because of the food-grade PCR use, and the fact that we’re one of the few doing it, and so folks have begun approaching us.
But in general, you know, having conversation with the packaging industry has been not that fruitful for regulators for decades, and so it isn’t a conversation that most have sought out. You know, even if there’s one or two of us out there who would like to genuinely have it and like to genuinely engage, it’s hard to find us in the mix of “nos” that the American Chemistry Council throws out there for every proposal for reform. So that’s a — I don’t know if the answer is discombobulated or not, but I’m finding that there’s not an easy answer to any of these questions. There has to be a thoughtful answer. To be thoughtful, you have to understand the packaging and the market and the prices within the market, and folks are very often unwilling to talk about prices and where they are today, and where they might be if we actually scale a proper recycling system, with proper PCR manufacturing, and then a proper end market. Those are the kind of conversations I think that need to be had in every state across the country that’s developing an EPR program.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:07)
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’m surprised to hear that those conversations didn’t happen as we were preparing for SB 54 to go through the legislative process. But let me ask this: if, in fact, all the pieces fall into place — regulatory, there’s demand, and so forth — can you get past 30% PCR in this packaging? Is this a technical limit or a supply limit at this point?
Kevin Kelly (32:34)
It’s a technical limit.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:36)
It’s a technical limit. So where can we go?
Kevin Kelly (32:39)
Right now, we’ve pushed to 50%. So we’re not at 100, and that’ll take, you know, some time. I think that would take several years, just given variations inside loads. But I think 50% is possible. It’s not the best-looking plastic on Earth, you know, but it’s certainly a reduction in virgin resin, and it is technically possible with the right company producing low-variation, high-grade PCR. And there are some out there who do that. So we found you can push it along.
I wouldn’t want to stake a claim and say all my packaging is going to be 50% PCR today, because I don’t think we could find enough consistent material, you know, to come up with 20 million pounds of PCR capable of creating 50% PCR packaging. I just wouldn’t want to do it. I think 30% is comfortable, and frankly, above what most companies are willing to attempt, which is around 20.
Mitch Ratcliffe (33:52)
Why is that?
Kevin Kelly (33:54)
It’s — I think this is where we get into, as a smaller, family-owned business, we can de-emphasize profit a little bit and say, okay, we’re going to push this to the technical limit that we’re comfortable with, and we’re going to accept more downtime for cleaning and dealing with loads that might require a lot more babysitting through the production process. We’re willing to do that. I think a lot of companies — once you, you know, if you’re owned by private equity, if you’re publicly owned, it’s a different calculus than the calculus we make. And I think that’s one of the benefits of smaller family-owned businesses. You know, if the family has a sense of social responsibility.
Mitch Ratcliffe (34:44)
Do you think that, in the private equity-dominated world that we’re in right now, we lack the sufficient patient capital to achieve a circular economy in the long term? Or are enough sources of capital starting to migrate toward this in response to things like the war and onshoring our supply chains and so forth, to get us there sometime within our lifetimes —
Kevin Kelly (35:08)
Yours and mine?
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:09)
Yeah, recognizing we’re both of a certain age.
Kevin Kelly (35:12)
My children’s, sure. You know, I’m 65. I don’t see it, unfortunately, happening in my lifetime. Now, I didn’t think I’d see an American Pope in my lifetime either, so there are surprises in the world.
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:30)
Miracles do happen.
Kevin Kelly (35:31)
They do. So I think, all things being possible, I would feel very comfortable saying my 25-year-old kids will live in a very, very different economy than the one I do today. And, you know, I think we do have to get past the private equity mindset. In fact, you know, the problem with where the social goals of society have gone, and where private equity has gone, has really shifted things far more, as you allude to, you know — getting returns within five years and flipping the company and, you know, doing this and doing this and doing this. It’s not worried, really at all, about social responsibility. So that’s where state mandates, I think, come into play, because you impose those upon companies that might not otherwise wish to engage them.
Mitch Ratcliffe (36:27)
When you imagine a grocery shopper picking up a bag of potatoes or romaine hearts, and they see that it’s made with PCR — what do you want them to understand about what that actually means to them and their health and the environment?
Kevin Kelly (36:42)
Well, I want them to know that it doesn’t affect their health in any particularly bad way. So we want them to feel comfortable that the recycled material is, in fact, food-grade, and what’s touching the food isn’t going to somehow, you know, introduce cadmium into their bodies, something like that. So you’d certainly want that — the bare minimum.
Then, I think, you next want them to know that this is a nice step along the road to a better, environmentally friendly packaging world, and that by buying this packaging and not that packaging, they’re choosing to support it. You see that most clearly in the experiment that Taylor Farms is doing at certain grocery stores with the fiber tray, fiber clamshell. You can choose the all-plastic one, or you can pay 10 cents more and actually get a little bit less spinach. Which one are you going to choose? And the consumer actually has been going for that fiber tray.
Mitch Ratcliffe (37:50)
All the data says that the consumers want those kinds of things.
Kevin Kelly (37:54)
They’re willing to pay a little bit more, or they’re willing to take a little bit less for themselves to participate, right? I mean, they feel like, okay, I’m shopping, but I’m actually making a statement in buying this and not that. So I think that allowing consumers to participate in building the world that they would like to build is important messaging that companies should be creating and making, in terms of marketing, what they’re trying to sell. Because you do want consumers to feel good about what they’re buying, but you want them also to be supporting the world they want, and the world we’d all like to see — which is a far more environmentally friendly one than the one we’re in today.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:42)
Well, we can hope and we can work. As Jane Goodall said, hope is an active verb. It’s not something you sit back and wait for the results of.
Kevin Kelly (38:49)
That’s good.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:51)
How can our listeners follow Emerald Packaging’s progress? Where should they tune in?
Kevin Kelly (38:56)
Well, I think we keep updates going on our website. I do a lot of interviews, and as we make progress, I tend to write about it or talk about it. Most of the articles about us, or information about us, eventually turns up in our news, the news part of our website. Or I started to use LinkedIn — we’re not a big company, so we’re not, you know, doing advertising on social media, or advertising on television, or anything like that. But we do try to get the word out there about what we’re doing and what we see as possible, both when it comes to PCR, when it comes to EPR laws, and when it comes to compostable materials.
Mitch Ratcliffe (39:43)
Well, Kevin, I hope that talking today helped spread the story, and I really appreciate it. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.
Kevin Kelly (39:50)
Oh, I thank you, and thanks for putting up with the complexities of the conversation. I think we captured that pretty well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (40:02)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, and the company that has now replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, in food contact bags that you can buy at Walmart through Wada Farms, and Andy Boy romaine hearts packages. You can learn more about Emerald and Kevin’s work at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Emeraldpackaging.com.
The headline here isn’t that million pounds, even though that’s an encouraging piece of news. The headline is that Kevin started having this conversation in 2000, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board first measured plastic in landfills and asked the American Chemistry Council whether the industry might participate in a recycling system. And of course, the answer from the industry was no. Now, 26 years later, Kevin’s family-owned bag maker has become, in his own words, the canary in the coal mine for food-grade PCR — because no industry body, no FDA process beyond that letter of no objection we heard about, and no California regulator has built the certification, testing, or chain-of-custody infrastructure this circular economy needs to scale.
Emerald is doing the customer education itself, walking produce companies through the difference between food-grade PCR and what Kevin colorfully called “any old derelict PCR,” which can be kind of gray. You’ve seen this in some Coke bottles, for instance. That gap between what is technically possible and corporate aspirations is the real story behind the million pounds of diverted plastic waste.
Emerald Packaging’s home state, California, can teach the rest of the country. You may remember my recent conversation with Zena Harris of Green Spark Group, in which California’s climate disclosure law is forcing a digital nervous system into being across Hollywood’s supply chain — and that regulation is doing what regulation is supposed to do. But, as Kevin said, SB 54 may do the opposite. The law mandates a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and sets a minimum PCR threshold. But Kevin pointed out that a pound-for-pound PCR credit, which would have encouraged people to replace virgin polyethylene with PCR, was wiped out of the rulemaking, so the fees are low enough that companies can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film collection and other low-hanging fruit, without actually addressing food-grade PCR. And yet, several years after the law was passed, conversations are just starting between CalRecycle, the California Air Resources Board, and packaging makers.
A mandate without the right price levers doesn’t drive the necessary transition. It delivers the cheapest path to compliance. And that’s a useful warning for every other state currently writing extended producer responsibility laws — including California, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota — where the design choices are being made right now that will determine whether or not food-grade PCR ever becomes economical at scale, or stays stuck in the boutique end of the market.
And a third point is the one that I’m going to be pondering after this conversation, and that is about Circulus. It’s a PCR plant in California’s Central Valley that was backed by Texas private equity and was supposed to be the supply-side answer to food-grade PCR, and it lasted only 18 months before Dow Chemical bought what remained, closed the California facility, while keeping an Oklahoma one running and moving slowly on a third site in Georgia. Kevin’s argument is that family-owned manufacturers, who can de-emphasize quarterly profit, are doing more to push PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund our energy and sustainability transition.
That maps closely to the lessons from my recent conversation with Disney Petit at LiquiDonate — circular infrastructure works when there is an immediate economic pull, as her platform creates by saving retailers money the day they sign up, and it stalls when investors are asked to wait for a market that requires a mandate, a law, to exist. So the case for patient capital is also a case for mandates designed well enough to create the demand that patience requires.
The billions of pounds of produce packaging that are shipped each year is not a problem one bag maker, one retailer, or one state can solve. And the 25-year arc of Kevin’s career argues that we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing. The technology has existed. It does exist now. The willing operators have existed — a few of them. But what’s been missing is the policy architecture, the certification backbone, and the capital structure that would let these operators do at scale what one family-owned company has now proven is possible at 30% PCR levels in produce packaging. The next legislative cycle in every EPR state is where that may be decided, and we’ll be tracking it on the show.
So stay tuned, folks. And if this conversation moved you, could you do one thing for the show this week? Pick a single episode from the archive of more than 550 interviews and send it to just one person who hasn’t heard us yet. A short review on your favorite podcast platform is the other way to help, because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
Researchers in the United Kingdom found that people who engage with the arts biologically age more slowly than those who do not. These results echo others over the years that show a correlation between exercising creative muscles and improved health outcomes.
Corrugated cardboard makes its way from warehouse to mill in about two weeks. In contrast, plastic packaging can take centuries to break down, and even the most optimistic estimates say only 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic is actually recycled. This difference highlights both the promise and the challenges of creating a circular packaging economy.
Back in April 2020, when this article first appeared, the recycling industry was still struggling after China banned imported recyclables in 2018. Around that time, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, marking the first closed-loop corrugated packaging system. Five years later, the circular packaging sector has become a $245 billion global market and is expected to nearly double by 2034.
However, growth does not always mean true circularity. The gap between what companies promise and what recycling systems actually deliver is under more scrutiny than ever.
How the Recycling Loop Works and Where It Breaks
Many people picture recycling as a simple process: items go from the curbside bin to a materials recovery facility (MRF) and then become new products. In reality, the process is more complicated. Mixed curbside collections have about a 25 percent contamination rate in baled recyclables from MRFs, so more sorting is needed before they can be turned into new materials. In the past, this extra sorting was often done cheaply in other countries.
After China stopped buying U.S. recyclables in 2018, the U.S. was left with about a third of its collected materials and no place to send them. This led to a crisis: many communities lost their recycling programs, and it became obvious that the U.S. needed more domestic processing and cleaner materials from better recycling programs.
Paper and corrugated cardboard are still the big success stories in circular packaging. In 2024, the U.S. recycled over 33 million tons of cardboard, or about 90,000 tons each day, reaching a recovery rate between 69 and 74 percent, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. The share of recycled paper used at U.S. mills has grown from 36.6 percent in 2005 to 44.4 percent in 2024.
Plastic is still a major challenge. Only about 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic packaging is recovered and made into new packaging or products.
A Growing Market With Caveats
Europe is leading the way in recycling growth, thanks to strict regulations. North America is catching up through corporate ESG commitments, extended producer responsibility programs, and state-level policies.
Paper-based packaging leads in circular packaging revenue, making up about 40 percent of the global market in 2024. This is due to advances in fiber recovery technology and the fact that consumers are used to recycling cardboard. Reusable and refillable packaging is growing quickly, but it is still a small part of the market. As a result, the food and beverage sector makes up nearly 47 percent of circular packaging demand, and packaging companies are teaming up with recyclers to meet this need.
Industry consolidation signals how seriously investors have bet on this sector. In July 2024, Smurfit Kappa completed its acquisition of WestRock to form Smurfit WestRock, one of the world’s largest paper-based packaging companies, with $32 billion in combined revenue and 100,000 employees across 40 countries. Separately, International Paper announced an agreement to acquire DS Smith in a deal valuing DS Smith at approximately $9.9 billion. These deals suggest that fiber-based, recyclable packaging is a durable growth market.
The DS Smith Model, Five Years Later
In March 2020, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, right next to an existing paper mill and corrugated packaging facility. These three sites could make, use, collect, and recycle corrugated boxes in about two weeks, creating a true closed loop. DS Smith got clean materials from distribution centers, packaging facilities, and retailers instead of mixed curbside collections, which helped keep contamination low.
Since then, this model has grown significantly. DS Smith, now part of International Paper, and other companies have shown that fiber-based packaging circular systems can work on a large scale. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2024 Global Commitment Progress Report, which covers over 1,000 organizations representing 20 percent of global plastic packaging production, noted that companies like Amcor have “doubled the share of recycled content in their plastic packaging, making as much progress in four years as in the four decades before,” according to EMF leader Rob Opsomer.
Where Optimism Meets Reality
But the numbers are more complex than market growth projections suggest. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) found that the 2025 targets set by its member companies in 2018—to cut virgin plastic use by 18 percent, reach 26 percent recycled content, and achieve 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging—are now mostly out of reach without major changes. Together, these companies have avoided using 9.6 million tons of virgin plastic since 2018, but that is less than 3 percent of annual plastic production. At the same time, the overall market increased plastic packaging use by 8 percent.
Scaling up reusable packaging has been especially hard. Even though 64 percent of EMF Commitment participants have started pilot programs, reuse models make up only 1.3 percent of packaging, according to the Foundation’s 2024 analysis. The main obstacles are structural: the U.S. lacks a shared reverse logistics system, does not offer enough consumer incentives, and has no binding policies to make reuse practical.
Greenwashing has made the credibility problem worse. In October 2024, the legal advocacy group ClientEarth released a report saying that vague plastic recycling claims, like “100-percent recyclable” and circular loop images, mislead consumers about the real environmental impact of products and violate UK and EU consumer protection laws.
“The thing that blew my mind,” said Myles Cohen, founder of consulting firm Circular Ventures, at the September 2024 Packaging Recycling Summit, “is that in the company’s defense, they argued, ‘Hey, our statements were just classic puffery.’” Cohen called greenwashing “a pet peeve that damages not just individual companies but the packaging and recycling industries as a whole.”
Not all circular packaging strategies are equally effective. The evidence shows a clear ranking of materials:
Fiber-based packaging, like corrugated cardboard and paperboard, has proven circularity supported by real infrastructure. The DS Smith model is successful because it uses clean materials and relies on commercial, not residential, collection systems.
Aluminum is the most valuable recyclable material. Recycling just one can saves as much energy as half a gallon of gas. Beverage cans contain 73 percent recycled content, and steel cans are recycled at an 80 percent rate, so metal packaging truly supports a circular system.
Reusable packaging is most effective in closed-loop commercial settings, such as logistics, food service, and institutional supply chains. It does not work as well in consumer retail or quick-service restaurants, where returning packaging is expensive and unreliable.
Compostable packaging is only a limited solution. More industry analysts are skeptical because most communities do not have home composting, industrial composting facilities often reject packaging, and composting creates greenhouse gases instead of recovering materials.
Plastic recycling needs a very specific approach. PET bottles and HDPE containers are recycled more successfully than most other plastics. Flexible plastics like films, pouches, and sachets are still mostly unrecyclable on a large scale and often end up polluting the environment.
The EPA estimates that updating U.S. recycling infrastructure will cost between $36.5 and $43.4 billion, mainly for better packaging recovery, more composting capacity, and improved plastics processing. This investment has been slow to happen because there are no binding policy requirements.
The E.U. Regulatory Push and the U.S. Gap
Europe has moved decisively. The E.U.’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) requires 70 percent of all packaging waste to be recycled by 2030, with plastics recycling rates targeted to double to 55 percent. Member states must cut packaging waste per capita by 15 percent by 2040 versus 2018 baselines. The European Commission is also requiring products claiming to be biobased, biodegradable, or compostable to meet minimum, verifiable standards to combat greenwashing.
In the U.S., California is leading the way with extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws and the new Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act, both aimed at reducing greenwashing in sustainability claims. However, there is little action at the federal level.
At the November 2024 Busan negotiations for a UN Global Plastics Treaty, countries failed to reach a binding agreement. This has left a major policy gap and prevents a coordinated global effort.
What You Can Do
If you want to make a positive difference, it helps to be both a conscious shopper and an active citizen. Here are some steps you can take in your daily life:
Choose fiber and aluminum products. Corrugated boxes, paperboard, and aluminum cans have real end-of-use recycling systems. Recycling these materials truly closes the loop.
Don’t just trust the label. “Recyclable” does not always mean it can be recycled where you live. Check if your local program accepts the material, and use Earth911’s recycling search to see what is accepted in your area.
Focus on reducing packaging, not just recycling. Buying products with less packaging, choosing concentrates, or picking refillable options has a bigger environmental impact than recycling alone.
Support EPR policies. Extended producer responsibility moves recycling costs from cities and taxpayers to the companies that create packaging. This is a structural solution that market growth alone cannot achieve.
Ask companies for details. If you see vague claims like “eco-friendly” or “100-percent recyclable,” ask questions: Where is it recyclable? What infrastructure is used? What percentage of the material is actually recycled? Demand clear, verifiable answers.
If you value the environment, keep a variation on Smokey Bear’s familiar advice in mind: Only you can prevent the economy from burning down the planet. Your response needs to combine thoughtful choices when shopping with active communication with friends, family, the businesses you frequent, and the representatives you elect.
Editor’s Note: This article, originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 14, 2020, was substantially updated in April 2026.
Multiple people were injured in a “major” chemical incident in Washington state, according to a local fire department. Posts Tuesday morning from Washington’s Longview Fire Department indicated that it was responding following “an implosion involving a vat of chemical treatment product” at a Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility. “Multiple people” suffered injuries including chemical burns, but the extent...
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