A radical idea to repair plastics recycling

Since the National Company Biscuit, based in the United States, launched the first brand consumption package in 1899 – putting its Unisea Soda crackers in waxed paper in a cardboard box – brands have seen the packaging as a marketing tool. From the 1950s, while companies were increasingly moving to the use of plastic, accelerated competition and packaging has become the best way to report a separate identity – the orange detergent jug of the image of Tide or the bottle of Ketchup Squeezy de Heinz.

But as brands have added an increasing range of pigments, materials and other complexities, the already fragile economy of plastics was collapsed. Only 10% of plastic packaging is recycled worldwide. Meanwhile, the reusable packaging remains niche.

There is a simple but powerful way to improve both recycling and reuse of plastics – ensuring that brands use similar packaging for products in the same category.

Let us first take recycling. Even with decades of consumer education and investment in infrastructure, it is too expensive to sort a lot of plastic packaging in individual subtypes. The pigments cannot be eliminated and sorting by color is expensive, so the colorful plastic goes to the gray pipes or the building material. The supply is inconsistent and fragmented, and virgin plastic is invariably cheaper, so reliable buyers for most used plastics do not exist.

Standardization could considerably improve things. If the product categories followed uniform guidelines for the type of plastic, colors, labels and adhesives, recyclers could recover at a lower cost much more materials. This could finally make recycling economically viable and help to realize the dream of “circularity”, in which a new bottle is made from an old one.

The case of standardized reuse systems is also convincing. Today, the few brands that experience reuse use mainly different containers. These need individual return points alongside personalized washing equipment and quality controls, which increases expenses and complexity while reducing convenience. Reuse systems based on standardized packaging and shared infrastructure could capture 40% of the market, compared to 2% under a fragmented approach, according to the Ellen MacArthur foundation.

Standardized packaging can look like an assault against capitalism for some, but brands are already producing similar packaging for milk jugs in the United Kingdom and for toothpaste tubes in many countries. And standardized packaging would not mean that all products should be identical. Brands could still use labels, washable inks, a embossing and other techniques to differentiate themselves. They could also always use their own packaging shapes and sizes, as long as these are not sorting.

Admittedly, it is difficult to imagine rivals like Procter & Gambler and Unilever voluntarily accepting to put their shampoo in the same color bottles. But as the data rises on the billions of dollars lost each year in single -use plastics that are burned or in discharge – and research sheds light on the health risks linked to thousands of chemicals poorly studied in plastic – brands can find that their corner is more difficult to defend. Legally, it could be argued that the damage caused by tailor -made packaging prevail over the damage caused to standardized container brands.

More and more, brands may not have a choice. In Europe and other parts of the world, policy already requires reuse objectives and the use of more recycled content. The standardized packaging offers brands a way to achieve these objectives while avoiding a leap in complexity and costs.

Similar shampoo bottles will not solve everything, of course. But such changes are more and more likely to be commercially likely. Without them, a really circular packaging remains a distant dream.