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try isn’t going to be easy, experts say. Scott Saunders shares DeFazio’s POLYPROPYLENE isn’t getting recycled nearly as desire for more much as its packaging-plastics counterparts polypropylene recycling. He’s MICHAEL MCCOY, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU general manager of KW Plastics, which calls itself WHEN ARIEL DEFAZIO opens the refrigpolypropylene. In fast-food restaurants, the world leader erator in her Denver apartment, she sees drink cups that were once made from in polypropylene yogurt, hummus, and margarine, all packpolyethylene or polystyrene are now berecycling. Today, aged in containers made of polypropylene. ing made with polypropylene. Saunders gets his resin from spent car bat“It’s hard to avoid,” she says of the ubiquiBut unlike PET and HDPE—known by teries and the caps and safety bands found tous plastic. their resin identification symbols as numon PET water and soda bottles. All that polypropylene frustrates Debers one and two—polypropylene, plastic At KW’s plant in Troy, Ala., Saunders Fazio, a law student at the University of number five, can’t be recycled by most is already recycling about half a billion Colorado, Boulder. She’s a passionate consumers. And because a wide range of pounds of plastics a year. The facility turns recycler, but Denver recycles only plastic polypropylene grades is used in a variety of ground-up milk jugs and detergent bottles bottles, which are typically made of polycontainers, replicating the PET and HDPE into new polyethylene pellets. It turns used ethylene terephthalate (PET) and highrecycling programs in place across the counpolypropylene into pellets or further prodensity polyethylene (HDPE). As cesses it into paint containers and she puts her polypropylene containother molded products. NASCENT FIELD ers in the trash, DeFazio gets peeved According to Saunders, KW’s U.S. polypropylene recycling is dwarfed at her city’s policies and suspicious customers want more postconsumer by recycling of other plastics of the companies that use a packagpolypropylene, but he doesn’t see ing material she can’t recycle. much emerging from classic curbRECYCLED Her frustrations are understandside recycling programs. “We are NONBOTTLE PLASTIC RIGID able. Thanks to improvements in contacted regularly by customers MILLIONS OF LB PRODUCTION BOTTLES PLASTICS TOTAL performance and clarity, polyprolooking for postconsumer resin,” HDPE 18,222 921 143 1,064 pylene is showing up more and he says. “The market needs to know PET 8,745 1,396 7 1,403 more in the packaging of nonbotthat there are ready, willing, and able PP 19,445 8 124 132 tled consumer products. Look in buyers out there.” NOTE: Figures are for 2007. Production figures may include Canada and the fridge, and the yogurt, cottage Saunders’ observations are Mexico. HDPE = high-density polyethylene. PET = polyethylene terephthalate. PP = polypropylene. SOURCES: American Chemistry Council, Associacheese, whipped topping, and takebacked by the American Chemistry tion of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers out food are all likely packaged in Council’s plastics division, which
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just put out its first-ever report on the postconsumer recycling of nonbottle rigid plastics. It sent surveys to 81 materials recycling facilities (MRFs) and concluded that 325 million lbs of nonbottle rigid plastics were collected for recycling in 2007. Some 44% of this was HDPE and 38% was polypropylene. ENTRENCHED Polypropylene Two-thirds of it was is the dominant exported, primarily to plastic container China. material inside In contrast, more refrigerators these days. than 2.3 billion lb of plastic bottles were recovered for recycling in 2007, a companion survey found. Almost all of these bottles were PET or HDPE.
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THE REASONS Saunders can’t get more
postconsumer polypropylene are complex. The collection of postconsumer plastics for recycling is a fractured business with few national players and no national rules. Plastics typically don’t bring municipalities the same amount of money as paper, usually the major tonnage material collected from municipal solid waste. Many towns and cities don’t even offer plastics recycling, whereas for others it is optional. Some places, such as Denver and New York City, collect just plastic bottles— defined as containers in which the neck or opening is smaller than the base. Others go a little further and collect PET and HDPE containers of all types. Relatively few municipalities collect containers or packaging made from polypropylene, polystyrene, or polyvinyl chloride. Indeed, the ACC survey found that only 28 of the 100 largest U.S. cities collected nonbottle rigid plastics through curbside recycling programs last year. Most of the cities were along the West Coast, where they have easy access to Chinese buyers who, at least until the economic slowdown, were willing to pay more for nonbottle plastics than U.S. buyers. The Association of Post-Consumer Plastics Recyclers would like to change this. The trade association is forming a committee, called Beyond Bottles, tasked with increasing the recycling of nonbottle rigid packaging. David Cornell, the association’s techni-
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“Polypropylene is a problem and an opportunity. Our challenge is to turn that problem into a larger opportunity.” cal director, has been in the plastics business for a long time, and he’s seen the rise of polypropylene as the preferred plastic for making some rigid containers. “The amount of material out there is large, and we know it, but we also know it’s not easily identified and isolated,” he says. Plastics picked up during household waste recycling are brought to a MRF. Because different polymers such as polypropylene and polyvinyl chloride have different properties, mixtures of plastics have little value to the recycler. Although a few MRFs have installed infrared sensors that detect different plastics, separation is more often carried out manually by people expected to work quickly for not much pay. As Cornell explains, the major problem with recycling polypropylene is there’s no iconic polypropylene package. “If I ask you to pick out a PET bottle, you will grab a soda bottle, and you will be right 100%
of the time,” he says. Similarly, milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles are almost always made of HDPE. “Hand pickers at a MRF have one-tenth of a second to make a decision,” Cornell says, “so they are looking for the iconics.” In contrast, margarine tubs, yogurt containers, and the like come in all shapes and sizes. And although they are more likely to be made of polypropylene these days, polyethylene and polystyrene are still used. To avoid mistakes, Cornell says, workers in recycling plants generally let them continue down the sorting line and into bins of mixtures destined for China, an incinerator, or a landfill. THINGS ARE starting to change, albeit
slowly. Pulled by demand for cheap recycled plastic and pushed by noisy consumers, the recycling infrastructure is slowly embracing polypropylene.
One sign of change is an alternative system for collecting the plastic set up by several companies that appeal to eco-conscious consumers. In January, Preserve Products, a maker of household products molded from recycled polypropylene, launched a collection program in collaboration with Whole Foods supermarkets, the organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, and the farmerowned cooperative Organic Valley. Under the program, called Gimme 5, any empty plastic container stamped with the number five symbol can be brought to a Whole Foods store and thrown into a special bin. Preserve will collect them for conversion into toothbrushes, disposable razors, kitchen utensils, and the like. Preserve, based in Waltham, Mass., says it commissioned a life-cycle assessment that found recycled polypropylene generates 80% less carbon dioxide and uses 67% less water than virgin polypropylene.
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John Lively, Preserve’s director for environmental and material science, says he’s stepping into the new program cautiously. For the past eight years, Preserve’s main raw materials have been rejected yogurt cups from companies like Stonyfield and leftover containers from a local hummus manufacturer. Shaping even these fairly homogeneous raw materials into colanders and cutting boards is challenging, Lively says, and has required the help of plastics engineers at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The plastics that will come back from Whole Foods will be of an even wider variety of colors and melt properties, he acknowledges.
knowledges. “That’s the way the industry is going,” he says. “There will be obstacles, but that’s what growth in this industry is about—overcoming obstacles.” Preserve Products’ Lively says the industry could overcome the obstacles of color and melt flow with more standardization. Cornell, from the recycling group, sees impetus coming from big brand own-
ers that want to appeal to eco-conscious consumers. A Procter & Gamble executive, he notes, is helping get Beyond Bottles off the ground. “The recycling business is very entrepreneurial and things change quickly,” Cornell says. “Polypropylene is a problem and an opportunity. Our challenge is to turn that problem into a larger opportunity.” ■
COLLECTION will have to move beyond a
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niche program like Preserve’s if polypropylene recycling is to get anywhere near the billions of pounds reported for PET and HDPE. The next stage needs to be at the nation’s MRFs, where polypropylene is starting to garner attention. In 2003, when trash giant Waste Management opened a multi-million-dollar plastic bottle recycling center in Raleigh, N.C., polypropylene wasn’t a consideration. But prompted by growth in the amount of number five coming through, the firm subsequently retrofitted the facility to process polypropylene. Dwight King, who oversees the Raleigh facility for Waste Management, describes a high-tech Rube Goldberg machine in which big bales of bottles are cracked open, metal is removed with magnets and eddy currents, and plastics are separated with infrared-based optical scanning and jets of air. HDPE is blown out first, then further separated into plain and pigmented streams. PVC comes next, followed by PET, which also is separated into clear and colored streams. Polypropylene comes out at the end of the line. According to King, of the 9 million lbs-plus of plastic he processes each month, 3 to 4% is polypropylene. It’s baled up and sent to customers for further processing. As a means of quality control, King explains, Waste Management designed the facility to handle only bottles. Broadening the stream to include other rigid containers would introduce a wider range of materials and an even more complex recycling process. Yet the company would recover more polymer—particularly polypropylene—if it processed nonbottle plastics, King ac-
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