Episode 66: Recycled Content with Nick Higgins (Glad)

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Episode Intro Notes

What We Will Cover

• What is recycled content?

• What is the environmental impact of using recycled content?

• How much recycled content is in various products?

• Why is it hard to increase recycled content?

• What companies have made commitments around recycled content?

• What policies are in place to mandate or stimulate the use of recycled content?

• How can definers buy more recycled content and help increase the amount of recycled content in products?

• Expert guest: Nick Higgins, VP, Commercial Lead for Glad Brand

What is recycled content?

• Have your eyes ever wandered to the bottom of your to-go container and found the words, made of X% of recycled content? Ever wondered what is meant by “recycled content,” or how it plays a role in our global recycling systems? You’ll never look at packaging, paper, and other products made with recycled material the same again after this episode. So, let’s get to it!

• By definition, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) refers to recycled content as “the proportion, by mass, of recycled material in a product or packaging.” In other words, recycled content refers to the percent of recovered material in a product.

  • Recovered material typically takes two forms: (1) post-consumer material and (2) pre-consumer material.

    • Post-consumer refers to material that has been repurposed from items that consumers have put in the recycling.

    • In contrast, pre-consumer refers to material that has never reached the end-user and was diverted from the waste stream during a manufacturing process.

      • Pre-consumer material does not include scrap generated during the production of the material. So, for example, if a steel producer has some steel scrap while producing the raw steel and then puts that scrap into the beginning of its steel production process, that wouldn’t count.

  • Ok, let’s use a simple example to review. Consider a piece of copy paper that has 30% post-consumer and 10% pre-consumer content. That piece of paper would have a total recycled content of 40%.

• Where do we see recycled content today?

  • Some of the common products you can find that can be made with recycled content include the following: 

    • Car bumpers, carpeting, cereal boxes, egg cartons, glass containers, laundry detergent bottles, nails, newspapers, and paper towels.

• Recycled content vs recyclability: It’s also important to recognize what recycled content is not.

  • Products that contain recycled material are not always recyclable. Your to-go container that is made from recycled content may also have a polyethylene layer that many recycling centers cannot accept or process.

• Without getting too much further in the weeds, we want to note that the ISO definition is just one approach. There are multiple accounting methods that people use for recycled content as well as multiple recycled content standards, some of which are industry or material specific. For example, there is the recently released Recycled Material Standard that is the first to offer both average recycled content and mass balance allocation claims. We’re going to keep it simple and just talk about recycled content in terms of pre-consumer and post-consumer material in the finished product. If you want to dive deeper into the topic, we recommend checking out a recent report from Eunomia titled “A Comparative Assessment of Standards and Certification Schemes for Verifying Recycled Content in Plastic Products.” We’ll link to it in the show notes and you can also google it to find the free download.

What is the environmental impact of using Recycled content?

• The utilization of recycled material presents many benefits to our environment.

• It’s a no brainer really: using recycled material means we’ve avoided the use of virgin (i.e., new) material. As a result, using recycled material means:

  • 1) reducing landfill waste

  • 2) reducing energy consumption

  • 3) decreasing the extraction of finite resources, and

  • 4) extending the material’s life cycle.

• But how much of an impact does utilizing recycled content really have? One example is metal cans.

  • When you make an aluminum beverage can with recycled material, it results in 80% less greenhouse gas emissions than if you made the can with virgin material. 

  • Similarly, with steel food cans, producing it with recycled steel entails 75% less greenhouse gas emissions than making a food can with virgin steel.

• Let’s get one thing straight, too: The creation of an item from recycled material still entails greenhouse gas emissions, but it is essentially always a net carbon savings considering the resulting avoidance of virgin material in making that item.

• Also, let’s note that if you’re comparing two different types of packaging, one with higher recycled content doesn’t necessarily mean lower environmental footprint. For example, a glass bottle may have higher recycled content than a plastic pouch but because of the heavier weight of the glass bottle, it uses more virgin material overall, which may result in greater impact on emissions and resource depletion.

How Much recycled content is in various products?

• To start off, let’s go back to metal cans, and note that the average aluminum beverage can manufactured in the United States is 73%. That compares to the average glass bottle having 23% recycled content and average plastic PET bottle containing only 6%. 

  • But remember our breakdown of pre-consumer and post-consumer material. That 73% average recycled content in U.S. beverage cans is not all used cans. It’s actually 50% post-consumer material and 23% pre-consumer material.

• More companies are starting to be transparent with exactly how much recycled content they use in their products. Several companies are reporting the recycled content they use in their plastic packaging through an initiative at the World Wildlife Fund called ReSource Plastic. In the Transparent 2021 report released in December 2021, here’s what some of the involved companies reported:

  • Keurig Dr. Pepper says the inputs in its plastic packaging are 98% virgin content and 2% recycled content.

  • McDonald’s says its plastic packaging inputs are 98% virgin content, 0.9% biobased content, and 0.6% recycled content.

  • Procter & Gamble says its plastic packaging inputs are 90% virgin content and 10% recycled content.

  • In total, the use of recycled content among ReSource Principal Members increased from 7.8% to 9.6% (+124,000 metric tons) between 2018 and 2020. 

    • Yeah, not a great overall number, but there should be some kudos to these companies for annually reporting publicly how much recycled content they are incorporating into their plastic products and using WWF’s tools to try to improve the recycled content number.

• Paper products incorporate recycled content too.

  • One example is newspaper. A 2019 UK survey found that newspapers there contain an average of 63.2% recycled content.

  • And then looking more generally and in the U.S., 42.6% of the fiber consumed in the manufacture of new paper and paperboard in 2020 was recovered fiber. The paper industry has a goal to get that up to 50 percent by 2030 as part of its Better Practices, Better Planet 2030: Sustainable Products for a Sustainable Future initiative.

• And you may be asking yourself how do we know this is the actual recycled content in the packaging that I buy? Well, some are industry reported averages. Others are third-party verified and give the exact amount of the package you bought. The granularity of the recycled content information and the level of verification are both something to consider when looking at recycled content information.

Why is it hard to increase recycled content?

• Consider that to have enough recycled material to go from 6 percent recycled content in plastic PET bottles to 25% recycled content in plastic PET bottles, every American would need to recycle 100 additional PET bottles each year. And that calculation accounts for the fact that one-third of PET is lost during the mechanical recycling process.

• That’s a lot of additional recycling per person that would be needed, especially considering only a little more than half of Americans have automatic access to curbside recycling and six percent have no recycling access at all. 

  • Just the six percent of American households with no recycling access means a loss of 280 million pounds of PET each year.

  • And then the typical 70% of people that don’t sign up for subscription based curbside recycling service in the areas it’s offered in the U.S. represents another annual loss of 660 million pounds of PET to disposal.

• A related challenge to there not being enough supply is that there is competition for the recycled material that is available. 

  • Sticking with PET bottles, other significant end-markets for recycled PET bottles are t-shirts and carpet. As t-shirt companies and carpet companies buy up PET to put in their products, that means less is available for the PET bottle manufacturers.

• Another issue can be that sometimes you can’t easily take a package made of a material and recycle it into a product of the same material.

  • This often arises with different colored packaging. Coca-Cola recognized this issue when it decided to make its Sprite bottles clear instead of green. It said the green bottles are technically recyclable, but the coloration makes it difficult to reuse the material in the form of high-quality, food-grade recycled PET.

  • In contrast, some products made of a certain material can be easily made into any other kind of product. This is the case with steel. For example, the steel in food cans is easily able to be recycled into any other steel product such as cars and bridges.

• Maybe you caught just a bit ago the mention from Coke about “food-grade” material There’s also a limitation in not being able to freely use recycled material with food-contact material.

  • Companies that wish to use recycled plastic for a food-contact application must submit information to and receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. and European Food Safety Authority in Europe. While this is important to protect human safety, it creates a barrier and can restrict the supply of the kind of recycled material available needed for certain products.  

• Reduction in quality or appearance can also hinder the greater use of recycled material.

  • Consider another kind of plastic, HDPE. It’s often used in milk jugs and laundry detergents. While recycled HDPE is widely used, its use suffers from performance and aesthetic issues, notably reduced stress crack resistance, visible imperfections, and difficulty achieving a bright white appearance. 

• And then some materials or packaging simply have a maximum due to technological or other limitations

  • Steel food cans have up to 35% recycled content because with the basic oxygen process used to make the steel tinplate for cans, higher levels of recycled content would actually create a more inefficient process.

What companies have made commitments around recycled content?

• As the push from policymakers and consumers for more recycled content continues to increase, many companies have made commitments to include higher percentages of recycled content in their products.

• For example, the “activators” of the U.S. Plastics Pact have collectively committed to several goals including, “by 2025, the average recycled content or responsibly sourced bio-based content in plastic packaging will be 30%.” 

  • The Clorox Company, which is the parent company of Glad, the sponsor of this episode, is one of the U.S. Plastics Pact activators.

• Looking at specific company recycled content goals, here are some more:

  • Coca-Cola says it will use at least 50% recycled material across all of its packaging by 2030.

  • Colgate-Palmolive’s 2025 goal is to increase post-consumer recycled content for plastic to 25 percent.

  • Kroger says its product portfolio will collectively contain at least 10% recycled content in packaging by 2030.

  • PepsiCo says it will use at least 50% recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2030.

  • SC Johnson says it will triple the amount of post-consumer recycled plastic content in its packaging by 2025. 

  • Importantly, these company goals differ on if they only apply to certain materials, if they are percentage increases in recycled content or hitting certain amounts of recycled content, and in their deadline.

  • If you want to see other company-specific goals, check out the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s Goals Database where you can filter for just the ones related to recycled content.

    • Seeing who is not on this list could also be a good way to get a sense of who hasn’t made commitments around recycled content.

What policies are in place to mandate or stimulate the use of recycled content?

• We’ve outlined the commitments that companies have voluntarily made but legislative mandates to use certain amounts of recycled content or that create incentives to use recycled content are another push toward greater use of recycled content.

• One such mandate is in New Jersey. A bill signed into law in January 2022 requires increasing the percentage of post-consumer recycled content gradually to up to 50% in a variety of packaging products, including plastic containers, plastic and paper bags, plastic trash bags and glass containers.

• There are other recycled content mandates in California and Washington.

  • A California law that took effect January 1, 2022 requires that plastic beverage containers subject to that state’s beverage container deposit return system must include at least 15 percent recycled content. The amount of required recycled content increases to 25 percent in 2025, and to 50 percent in 2030.

  • And Washington State enacted a law in 2021 that requires more recycled content in plastic beverage containers, trash bags, and containers for household and personal care products. The requirements vary but to give one example, manufacturers of plastic trash bags will have to meet a 10% recycled content benchmark by 2023 and eventually use 20% by 2027.

    • We’ll be talking more about trash bags in our expert interview coming up in just a little bit.

• If you want to dive more into recycled content mandates, consider checking out the January 2022 webinar from Northeast Recycling Council titled “Recycled Content Mandates: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” We’ll link in our show notes to a Resource Recycling article that provides a nice recap of what the experts shared during the webinar.

• At the federal level in the United States, there is no recycled content mandate although agencies are required to purchase items in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines Program to the fullest extent practicable. Items in these guidelines have been designated as ones that are or can be produced with “recovered materials.”

How can definers buy more recycled content and help increase the amount of recycled content in products?

• The first thing is to look to see if the companies offering you a product you want are stating how much recycled content is in the product.

  • We discussed there are varying strengths of these claims, but when choosing between products made of the same material, go for the one with higher recycled content. 

• You can also tell companies that you want them to make recycled content commitments or that you want them to make more ambitious ones.

  • These sorts of commitments are important since they send a market signal that if recycled material is collected and offered for sale, there will be ready buyers. In other words, recycled content commitments tend to lead to greater investments in recycling infrastructure.

• And then lastly is to recycle the products that are recyclable and accepted in your local recycling program.

  • That provides the material needed for manufacturers to create new products with recycled material.

More about our Expert guest: Nick higgins

• Nick Higgins, VP, Commercial Lead for Glad Brand

  • Nick has 17 years experience in large (P&G $60B) and mid-size (Clorox $6B) consumer packaging goods companies, building brands and leading businesses across Male Grooming, Female Beauty, Home Care and Corporate Capabilities.