Renewed push to raise plastic recycling rates

If recent legislative efforts in the U.S. and globally prove anything, it’s that real attention is being paid to boosting plastic and packaging recycling rates.

Their ultimate success, however, is hard to predict.

The sixth round of negotiations for a global plastics treaty ended the morning of Aug. 15 without a consensus on a legally binding text, and countries remained divided on several issues—namely caps on new plastic production, phaseouts of chemicals and products deemed harmful and a financial mechanism to implement treaty rules.

“Investing in American recycling infrastructure means investing in the American economy.” – Keefe Harrison, CEO, The Recycling Partnership

A majority of countries sought mandatory participation in each of those key points, but a number of others favored a voluntary approach focused more on product design, recycling and reuse of plastics.

James Kennedy, a technology analyst for United Kingdom-based research firm IDTechEx, calls the collapse of treaty talks a “serious setback” for global environmental governance and the plastics industry in a postsession statement.

“These negotiations represented a chance to establish binding global rules on design standards, recycled content and waste management targets that could have created the scale and certainty needed to accelerate investment in circular solutions,” he writes. “Without that alignment, the shift away from virgin plastics will remain uneven.”

In the U.S., the recent introduction to Congress of the Cultivating Investment in Recycling and Circular Local Economies, or CIRCLE, Act, represents a bipartisan attempt to spur recycling rates nationally. The bill would create a tax credit for up to 30 percent of investments in new and upgraded recycling infrastructure, including machinery or software to recycle plastic, paper, metals, glass and other materials.

In addition to easing the tax liability on private entities making recycling investments, the bill gives municipalities eligibility for a rebate equal to the credit.

According to The Recycling Partnership (TRP), Washington, the CIRCLE Act’s proposed tax credit would help return $8.8 billion in valuable materials to the U.S. economy for use in new packaging and products, create as many as 200,000 jobs, help governments save as much as $9.4 billion as fewer materials are landfilled or incinerated and provide more support for recycling in rural and urban communities.

“Investing in American recycling infrastructure means investing in the American economy,” TRP CEO Keefe Harrison says in a statement released after the bill’s introduction.