By Carol Zweep
Over three million tonnes of plastic waste end up in Canada’s landfills each year. To address plastic waste nationwide, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) introduced the Canada-Wide Strategy on Zero Plastic Waste in November 2018. This strategy, built on the Ocean Plastics Charter, takes a circular economy approach to plastics.
This approach aims to keep plastic products and materials in use for as long as possible, closing the loop through reducing, reusing, repairing, remanufacturing, recycling, and composting materials, and by recovering energy at a material’s end of life. While this approach supports a circular versus linear flow, some challenges must still be mitigated throughout a food package’s life cycle.
1. Front-end Design: This involves taking a design approach to packaging that eliminates problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging. Materials and components, such as labels, closures, sleeves, and more, can be selected to ensure that the package can be reused, recycled, or composted. The Consumer Goods Forum’s Golden Design Rules offer guidelines on which plastics to use to maximize the recovery of recyclable materials and increase the value of plastics in the marketplace. 2. Collection: Plastics collection can be challenging, especially in rural and remote communities and residential buildings and businesses. Collection systems based on Extender Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs assist in the convenient and necessary recovery of plastic waste. EPR is recognized as an effective model as it places responsibility on the producer (e.g. brand owners, first importers, or manufacturers) for waste management costs of packaging (vs. on municipalities and taxpayers). This incentivizes producers to make appropriate packaging design changes to support waste reduction, reuse, and recycling.
3. Participation: By raising consumer awareness, the industry can inspire participation in sustainable practices and influence behavioral changes. Examples include providing educational information on recycling to teachers and schools, as well as leading initiatives and waste management campaigns in businesses, organizations and institutions.
4. Sorting and Processing: Technology is evolving to better sort and process recyclable plastics efficiently. Advancements include robotic sorting using artificial intelligence, expansion of facilities for easy-to-recycle products, and scaling solutions including both mechanical and chemical recycling.
5. End Markets: Finding markets for contaminated or hard-to-recycle plastics can be challenging, especially when virgin materials incur lower costs than recycled materials. Diverse measures are required to increase the supply, demand, and quality of recycled plastics.
New packaging must meet municipalities’ infrastructure for recyclability and compostability, which varies from region to region across the country.
Food and beverage companies must also consider how user-friendly and acceptable the new packaging is, as well as how adjusting the packaging materials or design will impact their product, especially when it comes to food contact safety, the taste or odour the material could impart, and the product shelf-life and package integrity during thermal processing, handling, transportation, and storage.
Carol Zweep is manager of Consulting and Technical Services for NSF Canada. Contact her at czweep@nsf.org.