Packaging is big business. So too is packaging waste. Recent statistics on different types of packaging suggest a diverse and busy future for the waste industry, driven by evolving legislation and aided by new systems and technologies.
 The many types of packaging materials produced and used have a large potential for recycling |
A town of 100,000 inhabitants collecting 100% of its household recyclable packaging waste could recycle 780 tonnes of steel, 200 tonnes of aluminium, 470 tonnes of plastics, 2300 tonnes of paper and 2200 tonnes of glass per year.1 This thought-provoking statistic encapsulates the broad scope for materials recovery from packaging waste, and hints at the challenge faced by the waste management industry.
Packaging unpacked
Generally speaking, there are three main types of packaging:
• sales packaging - surrounding the product and informing a customer about the product
• secondary packaging - used to group a number of products together
• transit packaging - including items such as pallets and shrink wrap. Two companies that specialize in transit packaging are shown in the box below.
In material terms, packaging can be commonly divided into the following components: plastics, metal (steel and aluminium), glass, wood, paper and board. While it is impossible to cover all types of packaging within the confines of one article, there is scope to highlight the diversity of variables in this sector by examining one material type in greater detail.
Plastic packaging
Having settled on plastics as the ‘sample’ material, let us first get a sense of scale in this sector.
According to the British Plastics Federation (BPF), 50% of Europe’s food is packaged in plastics and the plastics industry employees 74,000 people in the UK alone [with a sales value of £2.75 billion (E 4 billion)]. Furthermore, data from the European Association of Plastics Recycling and Recovery Organisations (EPRO) suggest the use of plastics packaging is increasing, though consumption figures vary (from 11 kg/person in Finland to 24 kg/person in Spain).
In terms of recycling activity, EPRO states that approximately 1.8 million tonnes of plastics packaging were collected for recycling by its members in 2004. And - according to Applied Market Information Ltd (AMI) - Europe’s largest plastics recycling group is the Ravago group, which is estimated to reprocess in excess of 200,000 tonnes of waste per year at plants in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
What is plastic packaging and where does it come from?
Plastic packaging comes in all shapes and sizes - from bottles and plastic film to crates and drums - and a broad range of materials are used to develop these applications. For example, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and HDPE (high-density polyethylene) are both commonly used to make different types of bottle.
The majority of plastics produced today are termed ‘thermoplastics’, meaning that they soften when heated. Generally speaking, thermoplastics are easier to recycle than thermoset plastics. Polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are all commonly recycled, though recovery can be made more complex by a product being comprised of more than one type of polymer.
AMI has recently carried out a survey of over 1000 plastics recyclers in Europe. Data from this survey is available in their new report ‘AMI’s guide to the plastics recycling industry in Europe’. The report focuses in particular on companies active in mechanical recycling of thermoplastics.
According to the companies surveyed by AMI, the most important source of raw materials for recyclers is the industrial market, with nearly 90% of companies taking materials from it. In contrast, less than 10% of the companies sourced waste from the agricultural sector. Around 30% of companies recycle commercial or post-consumer household waste.
Managing plastic packaging waste
There are two preferred routes for managing plastic packaging waste:
• recycling: divided into mechanical recycling and feedstock recycling (chemical reprocessing)
• incineration with energy recovery.
In simple terms, for a single, sorted plastic waste stream, mechanical recycling is usually the favoured option, whereas energy recovery is more commonly used to handle mixed plastic waste or plastics that are difficult to recycle.
EPRO indicates that more than 50% of plastic packaging is recovered for energy in countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. But it is interesting to note that this is not an ‘either or’ situation, since EPRO also indicates that Belgium is currently leading the pack in terms of recycling, having achieved a rate of 32% (through a nationwide system for collection of plastic bottles, beverage cartons, etc., and a producer-backed company taking care of all transport packaging).
Recycling levels for plastics can be lower than for other waste streams because of the high volume-to-weight ratio. This makes collection services less efficient - unless, of course, the services include an element of on-site treatment, such as a mobile plastics shredder being tested by Axion Recycling Ltd in a project funded by the UK’s Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP). (Axion’s experience to date has found the service is commercially viable on material such as domestic water and gas pipes - commonly HDPE - but the case has yet to be proven in the UK for packaging materials such as larger food containers and crates.)
The boxes on p.40 and opposite page offer further data on these two disposal routes, focusing (respectively) on PET recycling and thermal treatment of mixed plastic waste.
Packaging waste generation and recovery
Let us now broaden the discussion of recovery rates to cover all types of packaging. A useful overview of packaging generation and recovery rates in Europe was published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in 2001. Data extracted from this review are included in Table 1. Unsurprisingly, recovery rates vary considerably.
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More recently, on 1 June 2006, the Steel Recycling Institute announced that the recycling rate for ‘the world’s most recycled packaging material’ - steel - increased to 63% in the US for 2005. And in the UK, DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) released its 2005 figures indicating that 74.2% of paper packaging in the whole UK waste stream was recycled, 52% for glass, 28.2%, for aluminium, 51.4% for steel and 54.6% for wood.
These data give some insight into the level of recycling currently being achieved. But what about the underlying mechanisms? What is driving recycling in this sector?
Packaging waste management
In common with other waste streams, packaging waste management systems depend on the interplay between the general public, industry and government.
Clearly the general public needs to be educated about the potential for recycling packaging waste and encouraged to avoid the easy option of disposal in mixed waste bins. The supply of plastic waste into the recovery chain relies on such education. (A useful information sheet on packaging waste is available at www.wasteonline.org.uk)
But while motivating public participation is important, such action would be fruitless unless the demand for recycled products (such as new packaging materials or garden furniture) is also nurtured. In part this depends on the consistent production of quality recyclate. Principally this means effective sorting by the waste industry. A case study from one company specializing in sorting equipment is shown above.
The third key stakeholder in this system is government. In Europe the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive is a key legislative tool in this sector, and is one of the few European Directives to contain directly measurable targets.
Ten years after adoption of this Directive, the EU Council and Parliament have asked the European Commission to report on progress. As an aid to preparing its report, the EC commissioned two studies, and EUROPEN (the European Organization for Packaging and the Environment) actively participated in the stakeholder consultations for both. The EC has yet to release its findings of this review; however, EUROPEN has made its own evaluation and recommendations. This report is available at www.europen.be and includes some interesting findings. For example:
• The Directive is succeeding in meeting its environmental objective as more than 60% of used packaging is now diverted from landfill, leading to (among other benefits) a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 25 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Industry-funded recovery schemes have been the major contributing factor to this success in most countries.
• The volume of packaging placed on the market has been decoupled from GDP growth in Europe.
• Member States have been permitted to adopt national legislation specifically targeting beverage packaging in a discriminatory way. This has led to increasingly complex and unmanageable regulation, in direct conflict with the spirit and aims of the EU Commission ‘Better Regulation’ initiative.
EUROPEN’s recommendations include - amongst others - the need for urgent action to safeguard the internal market and fair competition objective of the Directive, and to prevent any further erosion of the Directive’s harmonization goals.
Industry outlook
How can one summarize such a diverse field? An easy conclusion to draw is that packaging is big business. The value of China’s packaging industry output reached over US$50 billion last year, up 22.4% year on year, according to Shi Wanpeng, President of the China Packaging Federation. And the waste management industry is growing in parallel, having to move quickly to offer sustainable solutions and much-needed processing capacity.
The design of the packaging material itself is also evolving to take account of its own life-cycle impact. In addition to initiatives that support reusable packaging, designers are increasingly turning to biodegradable products, such as:
• Creative Edge Packaging hopes to transform the ready-meal tray market in the UK and Europe with its new environmentally friendly alternative. The company uses bagasse (waste from sugar cane once the juice is extracted) as its raw material, which is biodegradable.
• Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and International Paper have launched a hot beverage cup made from corn, which is also biodegradable. They claim that Americans last year used 14.4 billion hot beverage cups, which would circle the earth 55 times when placed end-to-end; and if all those cups used a corn-based lining, the saved oil could heat 8300 homes each year.
However, not all packaging is evolving with sustainability in mind. According to a new report from NonMarkets LC, the global smart packaging market will grow to US$4.8 billion in 2011 and reach $14.1 billion in 2013. The report, titled ‘Smart Packaging Markets: 2006-2013’, indicates that the arrival of a broad range of printable electronics is making smarter packaging possible. This can range from using chip-based RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags which combat counterfeiting, to time or temperature indicators on food produce. One wonders how this trend will impact on materials recovery and how the waste industry will respond to a blend of packaging that is part-polymer and part-WEEE. Let us hope that advances in packaging technology do not move at such a speed that the infrastructure developed to recover materials cannot keep up.
Guy Robinson is Commissioning Editor of WMW.
e-mail: wmw@jxj.com
Notes
1. Derived by the Bio Intelligence Service from Canadean & BCME, 2002, and ‘Performance, feasibility and cost of different collection systems’, Coopers & Lybrand, 1995.
2. Effectiveness of packaging waste management systems in selected countries: an EEA pilot study, European Environment Agency, 2005, www.eea.eu.int.
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Transit packaging
Cross Wrap Oy - a company based in Finland - manufactures automatic stretch-wrap packing machines, in particular for wrapping bales of waste and recyclable materials. According to Ms Satu Kivelä, Managing Director for the company, wrapped bales reduce the cost of handling, transport, storage and labour, and are environmentally friendly since the film is made of recyclable polyethylene. Wrapped bales can be stored or transported as required, without litter or smell. Cross Wrap’s machines are already in operation at approximately 100 sites in 24 different countries worldwide and, since 1994, they have wrapped over 20 million tonnes of waste materials.
Blagden Packaging specializes in the production, reconditioning and distribution of steel drums and other industrial packaging. Headquartered in Rumbeke, Belgium, it employs 1700 people in nearly 35 service and production centres across Europe and Asia. On 31 March 2006 it completed the purchase of the container and closure division of Hong Leong Group Singapore, thus widening its reach outside Europe.
An interesting aspect of the company’s business is that it offers the ‘Blagden Return Service’ to its customers in Europe, where used industrial packaging is collected and processed at their reconditioning sites in accordance with environmental and regulatory requirements. In this scheme, Blagden uses its own European distribution and collection network to collect suitable used packaging regardless of whether Blagden supplied the packaging or not.
PET recycling
The Packaging Waste Directive (2004/12/EC) stipulates that most European Member States must recycle 22.5% minimum of plastics packaging waste by 2008.
During the past 10 years the demand in western Europe for PET - used in soft drinks and water bottles - has grown from about 800,000 tonnes to 2.3 million tonnes (see Figure A). The main drivers behind this growth (circa 10% per annum on average) have been PET’s light weight, transparency, burst strength and its properties as a gas barrier.
 Figure A. The PET market in Europe, 2005 |
PET accounted for 14% of the 16 million tonnes of plastics packaging used in 2004 and 30% of the PET was collected. PETCORE has recently announced that European post-consumer PET collection rates reached 796,000 tonnes in 2005, a 15.1% increase over the previous year. Germany, France and Italy account for 60% of the European recycling via deposits, a green dot scheme and a product recycling levy. Switzerland has a high level of returns as a result of an advanced disposal fee.
In 2004 circa 75% of the reclaimed PET was recycled by mechanical means into fibres, sheeting, strapping and bottles (mainly non-food). In future, more attention may be drawn to chemical recycling and waste-to-energy as the price of crude oil continues to climb.
- by Rob Crawshaw, Consultant, Plastics Europe
Green fuel from plastic waste
In its Resource Conservation Challenge action plan 2005, the US EPA announced its intention to increase plastic wrap recovery/diversion from 6.6% to 19% by 2008. By implication the remainder is primarily sent to landfill. Non-degradable plastic forms a significant proportion of solid waste in landfills throughout the world. One potential solution for diverting this type of waste in the future is pyrolysis.
 EnvoSmart’s catalytic converter produces a high-energy fuel from plastic waste |
Dutch-based environmental technology company EnvoSmart Technologies has recently acquired the sole sales and distribution rights for the ThermoFuel system within a large part of Europe from the Australia-based company Ozmotech. The ThermoFuel system uses pyrolysis, catalytic converting and distillation to produce a clean-burning, high-energy diesel fuel. John Bouterse, CEO of EnvoSmart Technologies explains: ‘A major benefit of the process is its ability to handle post-consumer and post-industrial unwashed and unsorted waste plastics. This means that heavily contaminated plastics such as recaptured domestic plastics with a wide variety of residues (including oil and/or foods), silage wraps, trickle tapes, laminates and multi-layer films, can be treated without difficulty.’
A ThermoFuel plant can process up to 20 tonnes of waste plastics per day and is compliant with EU and UK emission and standards requirements. For each tonne of plastics, the plant produces up to 930 litres of distillate, which can be used as fuel for diesel burners, trucks and buses, etc.
John Bouterse continues: ‘although the fuel produced with the ThermoFuel system complies with the EN590 standard, it is still based on a fossil origin. As a result we call it “green diesel” and not “biodiesel”. In the current political situation, we do not comply with the European guidelines set out to stimulate biofuels; however, we believe that the global market should adapt accordingly and support all alternative energy solutions.’
Packaging waste sorting
The use of automated sorting systems in the recycling industry has seen a steady upswing since the mid-1990s. The earliest systems were all based on one type of identification technology - NIR (near-infrared) spectroscopy - which delivers characteristic ranges for different materials, enabling the system to distinguish between such waste products as beverage cartons, various kinds of plastics and mixed paper.
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NIR systems were originally used in sorting facilities to reclaim secondary raw materials from the packaging collected by Germany’s DSD recycling system. As installations increased, so did confidence in the new technology, with the result that people soon began to consider other potential applications.
In addition to sorting mixed plastics into different polymers, the idea that PET and polyethylene bottles could be separated by colour began to attract interest outside Germany. Today, colour sorting is handled by camera-based colour image processing systems or special high-resolution colour sensors.
From 2001, further development produced systems that are used to separate the de-inking fraction from waste paper streams. These systems have new sensors (CMYK) that recognize the colour quality of printed materials. Combining the new sensors with advanced NIR and camera technology gave the industry the high-capacity systems that it deploys in this field today.
Over the past few years, discussions have focused on extending the flexibility of sorting facilities to handle fundamentally different tasks. The new TiTech VisionSort sensor technology is equally suitable for sorting secondary fuels, separating PET colours and de-inking fractions or extracting recyclable materials from waste-packaging streams. The modular sensor concept makes it possible to deliver either a basic system that copes with current sorting requirements and can be upgraded later, or a system that can handle all potential applications right from the start.
- Tom Eng, Sales & Marketing Manager, TiTech
