Canada plastics pact members have ‘eyes wide open' on costs to go green

Canada recycles just 12 percent of its plastic packaging — about 21 percent of its rigid containers but only 1 percent of its flexible packaging. A new plan released Oct. 21 from some major consumer product companies and other groups, however, hopes to change that.

The Canada Plastics Pact released a road map outlining actions its member companies, including big brands like Coca-Cola Canada and Walmart Canada, will undertake to recycle or compost 50 percent of plastic packaging by 2025 and meet other targets.

Pact leaders acknowledge they have very ambitious goals but say that since the dozens of companies in the group collectively make or sell about 30 percent of the country's plastic packaging, they have some leverage they hope can start to move the market.

"Our hope is that it's not just for the partners in the Canada Plastics Pact but that it's going to help send a signal broadly to the industry, to other brands, to recyclers and waste management companies, to converters, that here's where things are going," said George Roter, CPP managing director.

The report offers a step-by-step timeline of what the pact plans to do to meet targets it announced in January.

One of its four key targets is to identify, by mid-2022, lists of "problematic" plastic packaging that its signatory companies will phase out by 2025, along with boosting recycled content and designing more recyclable packaging.

All told, there are more than 70 companies, organizations and governments who have signed on, including Unilever Canada; Nestlé Canada; the country's largest plastics maker, Nova Chemicals; and the federal agency Environment and Climate Change Canada.

"Our take-make-waste approach to plastics is no longer viable," Roter said. "Plastic packaging is a vital part of daily life; it is high-performing, lightweight and low cost. But currently, over 85 percent of what we produce in Canada each year gets used once and ends up in landfills or the environment."

Challenges with flexibles
The report called for attention on flexible packaging, noting that the pact will "urgently galvanize" partners and others "to build a comprehensive plan for addressing the complex challenge of flexible plastic packaging."

It said it will develop that plan by the end of next year, noting that flexible packaging makes up 47 percent of the 1.89 million metric tons of plastic packaging Canadians use each year, but that only 1 percent is recycled.

Rigids make up the other 53 percent.

Roter called flexible packaging "incredibly valuable materials" that reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions from food spoilage. But he said the end-of-life challenges for the packaging are substantial.

"They're not getting collected, they're not getting recycled, it's hard to put recycled resin into them, not the least of the reasons because of health and safety regulations," Roter said.

The pact's report noted that the tight integration of the U.S. and Canadian economies calls for working closely with the U.S. Plastics Pact, which launched last year and released its own detailed road map in June.

The two pacts have very similar goals, with each calling for 100 percent of plastic packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 and for member companies to have 30 percent recycled content in plastic packaging by 2025.

Both also call for a 50 percent recycling or composting rate for plastic packaging in that same time frame.

"It's super ambitious and aggressive," Roter said. "But I think what that also reflects is the fact that you have so many of these different players who have significant energy and ideas and time to be able to really advance these goals."

He said the pact's members also will be doing significant work on models for reusable or refillable packaging, and he said there's a general recognition of the companies involved that the cost of packaging will have to increase to deal with end-of-life issues.

"I think for those who are part of the pact, there's an eyes wide open [sense] that many of these changes are going to result in some of the packaging costing more to the brands or the people producing them," Roter said.

The Canada road map opens with what it described as a "vision" for plastics use in 2035, where it says that 75 percent of the plastics used in packaging are recycled and where reusable and refillable packaging systems are "easy and ubiquitous."

Perhaps most importantly for makers of plastic packaging, it envisions a change in the economics of the industry.

"As a result, the overall amount of plastic packaging has not effectively grown since 2025, even as its value has increased," it said. "Recycled polymers are now both cost-competitive with virgin polymers and represent the preferred option."

Both the Canadian and U.S. pacts and others around the world are part of a network organized by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.