The epiphany came when a certain coffee chain started replacing plastic straws with paper ones. Despite increasingly dire warnings about Texas-size islands of plastic in the world’s oceans, the sudden public debate over straws was arguably a turning point in how US consumers think about sustainability.
On one hand, the rise of paper straws is a brazen case of greenwashing, since straws make up only a tiny share of waste. On the other, the proliferation of paper and bamboo straws marked the beginning of a larger commercial pivot away from plastic.
Companies are beginning to realize there is more to lose from offending consumers who are aware of how cheap plastic products feed global warming, choke oceans, kill wildlife and — more slowly — threaten us. This is especially the case when it comes to packaging.
Illustration: Mountain People
Containers, cartons, wrapping and everything else discarded after a product is used make up about 30 percent of all US trash, or more than 68.94 million tonnes annually. Now the biggest retailers and consumer goods giants are racing to replace everything from plastic envelopes to plastic foam meat trays with fiber-based iterations.
The US paper recycling industry, it turns out, has suddenly found itself in demand.
Until last year, recycling in the US — from plastics to paper to assorted waste — was propped up by China’s willingness to purchase much of it. When Beijing decided it did not want the world’s garbage anymore, the value of US recyclables plummeted.
With an excess supply and no one to sell it to, prices for recycled residential paper even touched negative territory. That means cities have to pay someone to take away the material they collect.
For US towns and cities, what was at best a breakeven proposition suddenly became very expensive. Unable to sell recycling at a high enough price, they either had to raise taxes to pay for collection, dump it all into landfills or burn it. Many chose the latter options.
This has been “a challenging year” for municipalities that collect paper, said Renee Yardley, a senior vice president at recycling company Sustana Group.
Consumer goods companies might be starting to turn that around.
Trying to get ahead of regulations in countries that ban or tax plastic packaging, some product manufacturers are turning to recycled paper for the first time. With restrictions on single-use plastics in place across 60 nations and 350 US municipalities, analysts on global index provider MSCI’s environmental, social and governance research team said plastics “could lose market share to alternatives.”
More than 200 businesses, representing about 20 percent of all packaging used globally, have made commitments to reduce plastic waste, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Coca-Cola European Partners became the latest to do so, saying it would replace plastic shrink wrap with cardboard for its can multipacks across Western Europe, removing more than 3,600 tonnes of plastic annually.
It is expensive to recycle paper: The process begins with fleets of trucks to pick it up and facilities to clean it, pulp it and eventually turn it into rolls of recycled paper. Then it is sold to manufacturers for use in their products or packaging.
As demand for paper packaging rises, the US recycling sector faces another challenge: a critical need for expanded infrastructure.
Although the low price of discarded paper makes it cheaper for consumer companies to use it in their products, it is also attracting the attention of European recycling executives.
Miles Roberts, chief executive officer of DS Smith, Europe’s largest cardboard-packaging recycler, is betting big on the US.
London-based DS Smith plans to open a packaging plant in Indiana and a recycling depot in Pennsylvania later this year that is set to become one of the largest in North America.
Roberts said a key draw of the US market is that the price of recycled paper has become competitive with that of paper made directly from trees.
“It just takes a few years to get the investment in infrastructure going,” Roberts said. “We’re really just at the start.”
DS Smith’s customers include consumer giants such as Mondelez, Nestle, P&G, Danone and Unilever. They have been pushing the company to create the same types of cardboard packaging in the US for their products.
Over the past year, Austrian packaging company Mondi rolled out paper-based packaging for everything from deli cheese and premium watermelons to wine glasses. The company said that plastic packaging would still be needed in the medical and food industries, where other materials would be unsafe or impractical.
Mondi’s approach is more likely to be the rule than the exception. The company said its strategy is to use “paper where possible, plastic when useful.”
There are some recycled paper products that are not as biodegradable as advertised: Some are coated in plastic or contain chemicals.
Still, the demand for recycled paper products in the US is rising, said Pat Lindner, the new president of Atlanta-based consumer packaging at WestRock.
Lindner said that “retailers are now saying: ‘We need solutions for this, and we need it now.’”
Lindner joined the company in March, taking over a US$20 billion business after spending two decades in, ironically, the plastics industry.
WestRock has gone from working on a handful of new packaging projects to working on hundreds in the past year, he said.
It has replaced plastic wrapping for beer cans with printable paper labels suitable for advertising, and it is substituting paper for plastic lipstick and deodorant containers, as well as envelopes, e-commerce packaging and the dreaded plastic foam meat tray.
Ecologic, which makes molded paper bottles out of old corrugated cardboard boxes, said it is seeing growing demand as well. The company, based in Manteca, California, said it sold 10 million paper bottles since it opened in 2011, but expects to sell as many as 6 million next year alone.
“We’re a little bit more expensive than plastic, but there’s a desperation right now at so many levels to start looking at alternatives,” founder Julie Corbett said.
The company sells paper bottles for use with laundry detergent sold under Unilever’s Seventh Generation brand, and the Seed personal care line made by L’Oreal.
To compete with plastic on price, Ecologic has been automating every step of its manufacturing process, and collecting cardboard waste from L’Oreal’s distribution center in Los Angeles for reuse in its bottles.
Corbett said she expects demand for paper packaging to grow as consumer product giants shift household products back to powders that save water and could be sold in boxes.
The pricing gap between plastic and paper bottles should close as they scale up production, she said.
“The packaging industry has for years focused on cheaper, faster and less, but it’s utterly disconnected from the consumer,” Corbett said. “Paper isn’t complicated; that’s why it’s so beautiful. It dissolves.”
Still, to be recycled, wastepaper needs to be clean. Pizza boxes stained with grease, for example, would not cut it. Until recently, neither would paper products coated in plastic.
WestRock has been trying to change this, making changes in its recycling facilities so its machines could process paper products such as coffee cups that come with coatings, Lindner said.
In Europe, paper could “close the loop” in just 14 days, going from one product into another. European cardboard is typically 30 percent to 40 percent lighter than that made in the US, and uses significantly less virgin material, Roberts said.
As DS Smith’s Indiana plant begins operations, he said that lighter boxes are a big attraction for US companies, especially since it could reduce shipping costs.
Yardley agreed that active demand from US consumer companies is helping prop up the recycling industry.
“Customers are coming to us and making us think about it differently,” she said.
Sustana has worked with Seattle-based Starbucks to test out how it could make coffee cups from recycled coffee cups while making its recycled paper pulp compliant with US Food and Drug Administration food-safety rules.
The goal is to make more recycled packaging and containers that could be used with food, without the need for a barrier or coating, she said.
Roberts said his company aims to use techniques refined in Europe to replace plastic with fully recyclable material.
“The US is a massive, growing and fast-moving market for paper fiber,” he said.
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