Maybelline, Kraft Heinz and P&G join to recycle more plastic caps and other small parts
Food, cosmetics and retail giants team up to prevent small plastic from falling between the cracks of the recycling system. Read More
Maybelline, Kraft Heinz and P&G are teaming up in a new industry effort to rescue some of the billions of bottle caps, lotion pumps, pill bottles and other packaging bits that regularly go to waste.
Maybelline parent L’Oréal Groupe, as well as Target, have also joined the Consortium to Recover Small Formats, launched Feb. 19 with the New York-based investment group Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. Motivated by state laws and corporate circular economy strategies, the brands, retailers and recyclers involved seek to reduce small-format plastic packaging waste.
The consortium “provides practical and scalable approaches for recovering small-format plastics that end up in landfills,” said L’Oréal North America Chief Sustainability Officer Marissa Pagnani McGowan, in a press release. “We believe scaling these innovations will improve the recyclability of plastic and create a viable end-market for our materials.”
Next steps
“To create a future where small-format packaging is recovered at curbside, we first need to put our research to the test and measure the impact of our interventions in the field to ensure they meet intended impact,” said Georgia Sherwin, senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships at the Center.
“We know that implementing equipment and infrastructure upgrades alone won’t solve the problem,” Sherwin said. “That’s why our consortium model ensures that investments in infrastructure are paired with design innovation, education, partnerships and ongoing research, creating lasting change and advancing the shift from a linear to a circular economy.”
Proof-of-concept work in the field comes first, she added. The consortium invites other research partners and brands to join.
Small pieces, big impacts
The Association for Plastics Recyclers (APR), based in Washington, D.C., defines small format items as two inches wide across two or more dimensions. The nation’s patchwork recycling system is ill-equipped to handle such spare parts, which consumers often toss in the trash rather than recycling bins.
These components join the mix of the 32 million tons of plastic landfilled or burned every year in the U.S. The small bits add to the 91 percent of plastic wasted each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The APR quantifies the scope of production and waste:
- Between 0.8 million and 1.6 million tons of small-format packaging reaches the market each year.
- These items make up as much as 40 percent of plastic packaging by item, and up to 10 percent by weight.
- Added up, the carbon emissions of all this plastic amounts to the equivalent of all air travel in the U.S. for a day or two.
New laws, risks
Recently enacted state laws bring new risks to companies brokering in small, throwaway plastics. For example, SB 54 in California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, could create “new fines, market restrictions, mandatory redesigns, or even a ban on this type of packaging,” the Consortium to Recover Small Formats noted.
Other extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws to tackle waste appear on the books in Maine, Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota. First passed by Maine in 2021 and most recently by Minnesota two years later, the rules place the onus on packaging producers to tackle the waste of their spent products.
The case for recyclers
The consortium promotes the recovery of more plastic packaging as both enhancing recycling company revenues and reducing landfill expenses.
“We’ve seen how with the right tweaks and creative applications of existing technologies, recycling facilities have the potential to significantly improve material recovery, reduce waste and redirect valuable plastics from landfills to the secondary commodities market,” said Tom Outerbridge, president of Circular Services Recycling of Brooklyn, in a statement.
Maybelline New York sparked the formation of the consortium in 2022 when it asked the Center for the Circular Economy to help explore how recycling facilities could better handle small packaging materials.
Two years later, with more brands in tow, the consortium’s fieldwork included mapping more than 40 mechanical and chemical recyclers. It also conducted assessments of nine mechanical recyclers. Among the findings:
- 75 percent of materials recovery facilities (MRFs), the plants that sort municipal waste, are interested in recovering small format plastics to sell to recyclers.
- 25 percent of sorting facilities said they couldn’t recover items less than 2 inches wide due to the plants’ screens having gaps that large.
- Recycling facilities can nonetheless keep polypropylene plastic and certain metals out of landfills with relatively simple adjustments to equipment. For example, after the plants upgraded glass screens, the amount of small plastics contaminating streams of sorted glass dropped by 67 percent.
Recycling companies face no shortage of new plastics. The production of small format plastic, which derives from virgin petroleum, is expanding at a steady pace, according to Mordor Intelligence:
- In North America alone, 398 billion pieces of plastic caps and packaging closures will be produced this year, rising to 476 billion units by 2030.
- That market is set to increase by nearly 3 percent each year, reaching $17 billion in sales by 2030.
- In addition, sales of single-use plastic items will grow at about the same rate in the next five years, from $28 billion in 2025 to $32 billion.
More small format work
This new collaborative industry effort engages monthly with another small format circularity effort, launched three years ago by the nonprofit Sustainability Consortium (TSC) and also enlisting P&G, L’Oréal and Kraft Heinz. Clorox’s Burt’s Bees, Colgate-Palmolive, Ulta Beauty and Tetra Pak were also involved.
Small plastic items represent “a major challenge for brands that have set ambitious goals to make 100 percent of their packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025,” the Tempe, Arizona-based TSC noted in August 2023.
Plastic pledges
Some brands involved in the Consortium to Recover Small Formats have public circular economy and plastic recycling strategies. For example, in 2022, L’Oréal, based in Clichy, France, contributed one-third toward a $156 million Circular Innovation Fund, also backed by Demeter and Cycle Capital.
However, the new small format consortium comes as virgin plastic has enjoyed a boost elsewhere, including the Oval Office. President Donald Trump celebrated his “back to plastic” executive order Feb. 11, banning paper straws in the federal government.
Coca-Cola, the world’s plastic waste leader, said Feb. 12 that it could start using more plastic bottles, thanks to White House tariffs on steel and aluminum. Coke belongs to the U.S. Plastics Pact, whose members have been backsliding on what may have been overly ambitious pledges to reduce single-use waste by 2025.
According to a June report by shareholder watchdog group As You Sow, there are no large corporations working hard enough to meet the ambitious targets they had set to reduce plastic waste.
[Join over 1,500 professionals transforming how we make, sell, and circulate products at Circularity, April 29-May 1, Denver.]
