Podcast transcript: How plastics can play a role in contributing to the circular economy

Chris Hagler

Welcome to Sustainability Matters, a podcast series of EY. My name is Chris Hagler, I’m one of the leaders in EY  Climate Change and Sustainability practice and your host for this series. EY teams designed this podcast series to provide leading trends and practical advice around the environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues and opportunities facing business today.

As a society, our use of plastics now is 20 times greater than 50 years ago. We seem to use plastic in nearly every part of our lives. This material is used to create components of our food packaging, our sports equipment, electronics, and even automobiles. But unfortunately, plastics are also making their way into places that they don’t belong. Ocean plastic is a growing issue. You may be familiar with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is located between Hawaii and California. It is the largest plastic accumulation zone in the world’s oceans with a surface area approximately twice the size of Texas.

Some calculations estimate if we do not drastically reevaluate our management of plastics, we could have more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. So, EY podcast today will focus on the role of plastics and how does that play in the circular economy. Plastics are a versatile material. They have a tremendous number of uses; but as we’ve just noted, there are some challenges as well. So, what can businesses do to help move us toward more responsible use of plastic?

Helping me talk through this topic today are my guests, Jeff Wooster and Jamie Mattison. Jeff is the global sustainability director for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics, and also serves on the board of directors on the environmental nonprofit Green Blue. Jamie is the senior manager in EY Climate Change and Sustainability practice, and she supports clients as one of EY  practice professionals on circular economy. Thanks for joining, Jeff and Jamie. Before we get started, Jeff, can you share a little bit about your background and your role at Dow?

Jeff Wooster

Thank you, Chris, I’m happy to be here today. As you said, my name is Jeff Wooster, and I am the global sustainability director for Dow’s Packaging and Specialty Plastics business. We make polyethylene adhesives and other materials that are used in packaging in a variety of end-use markets. And my background is as a chemical engineer.

I wanted to invent things, so I went to college to be a chemical engineer. I joined Dow 32 years ago, worked in product development. Then I worked in technical service and development, helping our customers to implement new technologies, and then about 14 years ago, I moved full-time into sustainability, where I’ve had the privilege of leading our North American group and now serving as global director for our sustainability team for the Packaging and Specialty Plastics business.

Hagler

Well, that sounds like the perfect background for your role. And Jamie, could you share a little bit about your background as well?

Jamie Mattison

Well, Jeff definitely has me beat on years, but since my first day as a summer intern, I’m also an EY consultant lifer, and I’ve been with EY Sustainability Services practice for over eight years now. My general focus is on organizational sustainability strategy and goal-setting and disclosures, but I’ve had a few formative experiences which have really helped shape the nature of the work with the clients that I do now.

For example, in 2017, I was working with the UN Global Compact, when the United Nations had its first Ocean Conference, and really seeing firsthand how nations are highlighting the challenges that plastics and other ocean health issues had on their economies. It was incredibly moving. Thankfully, the business community was also taking notice, and since then, I’ve been really lucky to work almost exclusively on plastics and circular economy projects to help EY clients advance their understanding of the issues and the ways they can take action.

Hagler

Well, clearly, I have the right people on this podcast today. Jamie, before we jump into plastics a little bit, could you ground us on the definition of circular economy? I feel like it’s one of those phrases that people thrown around a lot, and we’re not completely sure what that even means.

Mattison

I completely agree. It’s definitely a nebulous term, and I’ll do my best to apprehensively give it a go. At its core, “circular economy” is really talking about circular systems which are attempting to transform the old linear model of build, use, and dispose. It’s one in which the outputs at each stage are reinvested back into the system, which is why this is getting termed as the “circular loops.”

It’s about reframing the idea of waste into instead consider each material as a resource which is to be kept out of the ground or the oceans and reutilized instead. That could be at the item level, it could be at its components, or even at the molecular level. I suppose we’ll talk about plastics mostly today; circular economy ideas and solutions can be applied to almost any other resource. Other hot topic areas right now are in electronics and lithium batteries, textiles and clothing is another huge area, and even in gasses. How do we create renewable hydrogens, for example?

Hagler

So, all-encompassing, but today we’re going to focus on plastics. Jeff, maybe you can help ground us a little bit on how do plastics fit into the circular economy? What are some of the benefits of plastics? And then we’ll get to some of the challenges as well. But let’s start with how the plastics fit into the circular economy.

Wooster

There are a few things that we need to think about when we think of plastics in the circular economy. First is we need to understand why we have plastics and what we’re using the plastics for, and that really goes to what are the benefits of a specific product for a specific use.

We don’t go to the grocery store and say, “I think I’ll put some plastics in my shopping basket today.” We go to the grocery store and we say, “I think I’ll get laundry detergent and I think I’ll get some shredded cheese in a bag.” And then we get home, and we realize that there’s a package that those products came to us in, and we have to do something with that package. What do we choose to do with it? Do we put it into the garbage? Do we throw it into our backyard or into a ditch? Hopefully not. Or do we put it in the recycle bin?

If it’s a case of the detergent jug, it’s pretty easy to put that into the recycle bin and most consumers can understand the concept of circular economy as it applies to detergent jugs fairly easily. They use the detergent, they put the jug in the recycle bin, and it gets recycled and made into new detergent jugs. And then you go to the store and you buy a jug, and it says on there, it contains 25% recycled content.

It’s a little more difficult for the cheese pouch though because we can’t just take cheese pouches and make them back into new cheese pouches. So, we need to expand our thinking of circular economy for plastics. We need to think about how we can take those resources and make them into new products that might be something different than they were the first time around, that we don’t have to only make cheese pouches into cheese pouches; we can make them into some other product, and they can be just as useful to society, perhaps even more useful.

If we think about circular economy for plastics, it’s really important that we think about the context of the system. Jamie mentioned the system being important and thinking of circular economy in terms of its general definition, and that’s also true for plastics. First, we have to remember that plastics are part of a bigger system, and then we have to think about how can the plastics that we are done using go back into becoming part of a bigger system once again.

Hagler

It sounds like I need to think about plastics as an input and an output, and maybe once it’s an output it’s an input again.

Wooster

That’s right. So, if we think about what we do with products when we’re done with them — and they could be plastics, they could be something else — if we can get another use out of those products, we’ve improved our efficiency. We’ve improved the utilization of natural resources that we have available to us to maintain a high quality of life on this planet. And that’s true whether you’re talking about clothing, it’s true for car seats, it’s true for automobiles, it’s true for refrigerators. If I’m done with my refrigerator, but it still functions, and I give it to my neighbor and he uses it instead, then I get more lifetime out of that refrigerator and I’ve gained from the resources that were invested in the manufacturing of that refrigerator.

It’s exactly the same for plastics. When we make plastics, we want to keep them in the system as long as we can. If we can take them and turn them into new plastics, that’s fantastic. If we can turn them into new items made from plastic, that’s also fantastic. If we can make them into other items that are useful to society and to consumers, that’s great too. It’s all about the resource efficiency and maintaining the value of the materials as long as we can and as well as we can in order to allow us to have a sustainable existence on this planet.

If we think about why we want circular economy, if we think about why we want to recycle, it’s really to do a better job of using our resources so that we don’t run out. We don’t want to run out of energy, we don’t want to run out of raw materials, we don’t want to run out of land to grow food on, and so we’ve got to use our resources more efficiently going forward than we have in the past. And plastics can be a part of that because plastics are efficient materials. They’re lightweight, they don’t take much energy to create, and they can be reused; but we’ve got to do a better job than we have of putting them back into the system and getting more use out of them.

Hagler

Let’s go further on that, Jeff, because you mentioned the laundry jug. That’s easy. There’s always the big picture in the recycle bin that says you can recycle this, but there are a lot of plastics that are more difficult to recycle or to reuse. Share some of the challenges that we have in general, and are there some things that Dow is doing to help address those challenges?

Wooster

Recycling is a system. It requires many steps in order to be effective. First, we have to collect a material for use, then we have to identify it, perhaps sort it, perhaps clean it; but we definitely need to reprocess it, and we need to turn it into something else that’s useful. And then we have to make use of that thing that we’ve turned it into. So, there are multiple steps in the process that are necessary for recycling of plastics to be effective, just as many steps are necessary to make the circular economy for other processes and other materials effective at giving us the benefits that we want from those systems.

So, if we think about the example of the cheese pouch that I mentioned: if we take a cheese pouch and if we are able to collect it for recycling, which is not something that we generally do today, but if we are able to collect it, then we need to understand what’s the material of construction of that cheese pouch, how can we get the cheese separated from the plastic, and how can we turn that plastic into something that’s useful to society?

An example of a project that we have been working on around the globe to help turn materials that otherwise would have been waste into something useful is our work on creating what we call plastic roads. We’re using collected waste plastic as a modifier for asphalt and we’re putting the plastic into the roads in order to improve the durability of the roads and provide for road construction in areas where asphalt roads need to be built.

We’ve done different projects in the US with different segments of roads in locations in Michigan and Texas, and we’ve built parking lots. We’ve partnered with companies around the world who have built roads in Indonesia, India, South America, and other places. It’s a great example of how we can expand our thinking of circular economy beyond just recycling milk jugs or detergent jugs and really think about how we can use resources that are in those other types of plastics that aren’t so easy to recycle via conventional technologies, but yet still have utility and still have value after the product inside the package has been used.

So for the cheese pouch, we eat the cheese and then we take that package, we clean it up, and we put it into a process where we make it into another product in the example that I gave, plastic roads.

Mattison

Jeff, I love this example of this project, and I know how it fits into your broader in 2025 circular economy goal. This is one of the things I think Dow is doing really well at the moment in having clear, quantifiable targets about the impact that you want to have across your value chain. I’m thinking of your other goal, which is really to close the loop by enabling 100% of Dow products sold into packaging applications to be reusable or recyclable by 2035.

We’ve really been seeing a maturing in the way the chemical companies are measuring the value that their products can bring to their customers and helping them achieving their own sustainability goals, for example, through additives that can help reduce the total amount of virgin plastics which are needed for a given manufacturing process. So, I really love that your tangible targets are increasingly being made public and seeing other companies as well do them in gross dollar values to make X many million out of these types of sort of environmentally beneficial products or to have a target percentage of their revenues.

I think it’s really helpful to signal to the wider market that Dow and other companies are ready to make these long-term commitments to R&D  pilots and all of the investment that’s required to actually scale up some of these new technologies and products.

Wooster

Yes, thank you for that, Jamie. The public commitments are really important for two reasons. Number one, it signals to the marketplace that we’re serious and that we’re working on new innovations that help deliver solutions to the market that are going to be beneficial to our customers, to our customers’ customers and to the ultimate consumers throughout the value chain.

The other thing that it does is it provides a goal for our internal partners. Employees within the company and those organizations that we work directly with on implementing our goals, when they have a target that says we’re going to recycle or recover a million tons of material, for example, they see and understand the impact of that, and they can see and understand that it means that we’re going to be making investments in order to put more plastics back into the circular economy.

It’s something that we’re committed to doing, and making those commitments, I think, is a great way to help both the internal partners in the company and also our external partners from outside the company understand what our level of commitment is, and figure out how to take the right actions that collectively working together we can implement in order to really have an impact and benefit society.

Hagler

Jeff, we’ve talked a lot about the recycling, the collecting back, reusing, putting it into a new product, a different product or a different plastic product. Are there other things within your processes or internal processes, such as R&D, that need to be taken into account as you work toward a more circular economy?

Wooster

To achieve a true circular economy, we’ve got to have lots of solutions for different parts of the cycle. So, we’ve got to have the right kind of materials that are designed to be made into packaging that’s recyclable. Then we’ve actually got to design that packaging, and sometimes that means combining different materials, but still making sure that they’re able to be recycled.

Then we’ve got to have collection systems. Then we need processing technologies, and along with those processing technologies comes things like high-performance additives and high-performance polymer modifiers that when mixed together with virgin and recycled materials can help improve their performance — either improve their physical properties, or improve the appearance, or improve the processability, or improve the stability during the processing operations. There are all kinds of different things that we can do through the material science and chemistry knowledge that we have that can help us facilitate a more circular economy.

A lot of that technology has not yet been developed and implemented. It takes R&D, it takes an investment in those new technologies — not just in developing them, but it also takes an investment in implementing them and getting them commercialized and brought to the marketplace. It’s a very large marketplace for plastics, as you know, and so to have a huge change in the marketplace requires some patience. It requires a period of time, and it requires an investment in getting all the people that need to make those changes to change their equipment, to change their technologies, to change their processing capabilities, but most importantly, they have to change their mindset.

They need to change their mindset that will allow them to take materials and make new materials in ways that they hadn’t thought of before. They need to think of ways to process materials perhaps in a way that’s not quite as convenient to them, but will give them the same desired products when they get done with their manufacturing process in a way that ultimately is more sustainable for both their companies and also for society as a whole.

Hagler

That sounds like a tall order, I have to say, Jeff. But I would imagine, even within Dow right now a goal for 2035, there must be a lot of pressure for substantial innovation.

Wooster

I think there’s incredible opportunity for innovation right now, and I worked in R&D for many years, so I understand the one thing that R&D enjoys is a challenge. Most people that work in R&D chose those jobs because they wanted a challenge and because they wanted to come up with solutions to things that were important to people. And so, our R&D department has done a great job of responding to the challenges we’ve given to them. They’ve developed lots of technologies for things like recyclable pouches.

I can remember when we first started having the conversation about 10 years ago about why don’t we make a standup pouch that’s just made out of polyethylene and displace multilayer, multi-material pouches that aren’t recyclable, but is something that’s easy to recycle, but it still can give the same performance. Lots of people thought the idea was crazy. And we had a professor that said to us, he said, “The crazy ideas are the ones that are the most useful, if you can make them work.”

Our R&D teams went about figuring out how to not only design the materials, but how to redesign the packaging machinery that made the pouches and filled them with products that allowed polyethylene pouches to be run on machines that previously ran laminated pouches made from multiple materials. There are a number of steps that are required in those types of innovation activities, but it’s something that our R&D organization really takes hold of and does a good job of developing solutions for it.

Now, that’s not to say that there’s an easy solution to every problem out there. Many of the problems that we’re facing are very, very difficult problems; but certainly the R&D function within our company, and I’ve witnessed in companies that we’ve worked with as well, give them a challenge and they will rise up and find a solution.

Hagler

I love that. In your company there’s a combination of developing new materials, having to modify the products, like you said, probably a mindset shift, probably your salespeople need to talk about your products differently. So, a whole systemic approach to dealing with the challenge and the opportunities as it relates to plastic.

When I think about the recycling world, it’s also very systemic. There’s need for mindset shift. There’s need for new materials. There’s need for new machines to be able to recycle things differently or sort, or that type of thing. I just feel like not one company can do that all by themselves, or one city. So, Jamie, I feel like you’ve had some experience, where you’ve worked with more alliances or groups of organizations that have come together to address these challenges.

Mattison

Yes, absolutely, Chris. I mean, that’s the main movement we’ve seen over the last few years. It’s just how businesses and entire industries are really working together. And I’ve been thinking about this. I see three main buckets in which they’re doing that. We’ve talked a little bit about ambition-setting as the first step, which Dow is doing, but then we also see them coming together around design, whether that’s products or new business models. And then the third is around actually taking action.

On that first front, a number of NGO led initiatives have really emerged over the last few years to define that common level of ambition for all companies to aspire, but not just aspire, but also to commit to. The US Plastics Pact is just one example which is gaining incredible traction since its launch just six months ago. It’s building off the success of the existing UK Plastics Pact, but it now counts more than 80 organizations as activators of the pact which are delivering common targets related to packaging recyclability and the use of recycled content in their own organizations.

This is amazing progress. It’s just something that we didn’t have a few years ago and to now have so many companies working toward the same goal is incredibly helpful for industry alignment. And to do that on the design front we’re also seeing a number of industry working groups which are being established to address issues within value chains.

I know, Chris, you and I have been working to help EY clients who are usually direct competitors to actually undertake projects together, to collaboratively design new market models. But then looking at extended user responsibility systems and what that could mean in terms of benefits and costs for each organization. But really more so, what does a well-designed, industry-led solution look like and how can they use that to inform their regulators when they’re designing new policies which will affect them in the near term?

On that third piece that I talked about, taking action, and this is where I get to give credit to Jeff. I think it must have been over three years ago that you and a handful of your peers, I listened while you outlined your vision for a global cross-value chain alliance that would focus on direct financial investments in the Asia-Pacific region, which was really the areas which are still most affected by plastic leakage. And I know it was a real privilege to work with you over the next couple of years to actually help turn that vision into a reality.

I’ll never really forget that first meeting we had in Singapore, where we, through a series of telephone, managed to invite around 50 companies who we thought might possibly be interested in the topic. We had an eight-hour day and four hours’ worth of slides trying to convince them about why they should care about plastic waste and why this was important for their company. But after our first round of introductions, it just became clear how personally vested all of these individuals were and how it mattered to their company as well. So, the conversation almost immediately shifted to how do we make this happen?

Wooster

And I think, Jamie, that really highlights how far we’ve come as an industry, starting with that work that we did about three years ago. And the industry now certainly has much, much better alignment and agreement on the need to take quick action for swift results to not only impact the issue of plastic waste in the environment, but also around things like circular economy and how we keep the value of plastics circulating in the system through all different kinds of recycling technologies, whether that’s conventional mechanical recycling technologies, various advanced recycling technologies.

And that includes lots of different things — new sorting technologies, new washing, new processing, new end-use market development — all kinds of things that companies from across the supply chain are really willing to work together to help implement now. Even the discussions around extended producer responsibility, which now has very broad company support in regions where it doesn’t currently exist. It’s really shown how far industry has come in trying to identify the solutions that can help resolve the issues that we face, which are significant.

And I think it’s important that people recognize that we don’t just need a plastics circular economy for plastics, but we need plastics for the sustainability of our planet because of the benefits that they offer in terms of light weight, energy efficiency, fuel savings, and the like. We’ve come a long way; we still have a long way to go. There are lots of challenges ahead for us to continue to tackle, and I suppose we should probably talk about that a little bit more.

Hagler

I am going to talk about that a little bit more; however, I want to just dig in really quick because I’m not sure all of our listeners are familiar with the phrase “extended producer responsibility.” Jeff or Jamie, can you give a little bit of description of what that means?

Wooster

Extended producer responsibility basically means that the producer or manufacturer of a product has an extended level of responsibility that includes managing what happens to the waste that’s created from that product after the product the is used. So, for the example that I was giving earlier, the detergent jug, it would mean that the manufacturer of the detergent takes some responsibility in contributing to a system that helps ensure detergent jugs get collected and put back into the processing system so that they can be recycled and made into new detergent jugs and other new products.

It’s a way of making sure that instead of just dropping off the responsibility with the consumer once they’ve purchased the item, that the manufacturer of the original product helps to ensure that the right system is in place for managing any waste that might be created from that product.

Hagler

And this is something that’s fairly common in Europe. But Jamie, do we see this in the United States?

Mattison

Yes, absolutely. I was going to build on Jeff’s example and say that, while I mentioned that it can be regulated, it certainly can be voluntary as well. One example is glass milk jugs. It’s a concept from back in the day, but I know that I have the choice of choosing a brand where they may level a $2 charge additional, which I would pay at the counter. Actually, that charge is for the bottle itself, and if I bring it back to a grocer, they will return that. That’s a voluntary program that those brands have opted into in order to have a competitive advantage.

Whereas, as you say, Chris, in Europe and in other areas that could be mandated. And we have deposit bottle return schemes in I think it’s 10 states around the US where really 5 cents or 10 cents is also added to the cost of the bottle and product, and then that is refunded to the consumer when they return the item.

Wooster

And there are all different kinds of extended producer responsibility schemes in use in the US and around the world. We don’t see the schemes that are used for packaging so much in the US as we do in Europe and Canada, but we do see extended producer responsibility programs in place for other things like car batteries, for example.

When you buy a car battery you may notice a $5 charge on your bills, which is to ensure that used batteries get sent back into the system and get reprocessed. And in fact, car batteries are recycled at a very high rate. Both the contents of the batteries and also the plastic from which those batteries are made, the outer casings, gets recycled. And that’s in place because they have a system that helps to pay for the operation of the entire system and ensure that the cost of collecting and doing that reprocessing are, in fact, covered.

Hagler

They’ve set a value for something that would previously be considered waste. And that’s part of what you’ve been talking about this whole time, Jeff, is how do we make sure that people realize there is value in that plastic in order to reuse it again, that that has value.

Wooster

That’s exactly right. And the purpose of setting the value on used packaging really is two-fold. One is to ensure that we get the material back so that it can stay in the system so that we don’t need to extract as much raw material out of the earth in order to make new packaging as we otherwise might.

The other reason is to make sure that we avoid those possible external costs that previously were not included in the system. For example, if there’s a cost for cleaning up litter from products that are littered, and you now are being able to avoid that clean-up cost and the environmental damage associated with the litter because you’ve avoided the litter — because you have a better waste collection and recycling collection system in place for those products at the places where they’re used and disposed of — you’ve now traded off that unidentified, unknown, unassigned environmental burden associated with the litter, and it is a real cost. It’s just that nobody pays it and it’s not calculated. You’ve traded that off for something that’s known and can be calculated and can be managed.

It’s not that we’re doing something for nothing, we’re getting a benefit out of it. Part of it is that we’re trading off for something that we weren’t calculating before.

Hagler

And I think we could do a whole other podcast just on that topic of the trade-offs and externalities. Let’s come back to the use of plastics. And you were talking your business from the beginning, Jeff. You were talking about the different types of organizations that use plastics. They’re in our food packaging, they’re in automobiles, they’re in health care products. They’re pretty much in every sector of our economy. Let’s just assume that most of the people listening today that make some sort of product or even provide services use plastics. What can EY  business listeners today do to contribute to a positive circular economy for plastics?

Wooster

Well, there are two key things that any business can do to help encourage circular economy development for plastics. One, is that they can act on the supply side; and two, is that they can act on the demand side.

So on the demand side, if you’re a company that buys products made from plastic, you can ask your supplier: “Please include recycled content in these materials.” “Please ensure that your product is not delivered in a way that makes it likely to end up as litter in the environment.” “Please make sure that you are doing everything possible to do proper management of the pellets and the intermediate products that are used for manufacturing your final product.” We have an industry program on pellet management to avoid the loss of pellets into the environment called Operation Clean Sweep. And if you’re a processor, if you handle pellets, that’s something that you can sign onto to make sure that you do not release pellets into the environment, as an example of what those companies can do.

If you’re a company that buys plastic products, but you don’t handle pellets yourself, you can ask your suppliers to participate in Operation Clean Sweep to ensure that your supply chain does not accidentally put pellets into the environment. You can do things on the demand side by asking for the right products, including recycled content and including good environmental principles in your operation.

Then on the other side, you can help by making sure as a consumer, whether you’re an individual consumer in your own household or whether you’re an industrial consumer or large business, that you’re taking the products that you’re done with and you’re putting them back into the system in the appropriate way. This is very easy for individuals to understand because it means putting plastics into their recycling cart, or their recycling bin, or taking them to a drop-off center, or taking their bottles back for redemption at their local redemption center.

If you’re a business though, you can do the exact same thing. And that is that you can make sure that your industrial scrap and any waste that you generate in your process goes back into the system, whatever that system might be. And there are a lot of companies who make it their business to collect used plastics from large organizations that have large amounts of material available, and they turn those into new products. So, it’s something that really everybody can participate in.

Mattison

I agree, Jeff. The consumers also have a responsibility to educate themselves; unfortunately, we don’t receive as much education as we should about how the recycling system works and what is and isn’t recyclable. And I think labeling has helped somewhat, obviously, in putting that symbol on, but is somewhat harming at the moment.

As options for flexible recycling, and you know, what I’m thinking about here is grocery store bags and those delivery packaging pouches which you receive, there are options to recycle those now, but almost none of my friends could tell you what store drop-off means and where their local store is. I think consumers can educate themselves on how to handle difficult materials and perhaps even how to gently educate their friends and family to do the same.

Wooster

That education of the friends and family is really important, Jamie; and I think most people get their information about recycling and most of the things they do at home from their friends, from their family, from people they trust, and from word of mouth.

You can go on the internet and you can look up information, sure; but if you look it up and you’re not quite sure if it’s right or you don’t quite understand what the instructions are, you’re going to stand out at the end of your driveway and you’re going to ask your neighbor, “Hey, what do I do with this recycling?” It’s really, really important to people who are committed and understand how the recycling system works, understand what materials can be recycled, understand things like knowing that there are drop-off centers. I live in Texas and we have drop-off centers. I can take an old television and drop it off. I just pull into the garage bay at the recycling center and open the hatch of my SUV or the trunk of my car, and the worker comes, and he takes the TV out, and he takes it, and he puts it on the recycling pile. It’s really quite easy, but most people don’t know that it exists.

There is an opportunity to learn more about the system, but I think there’s also an opportunity to for those who are already engaged to help educate the people that need to know. It’s important though as an industry that we recognize that education alone isn’t going to fix the problem, because people can be educated and they can know about the solutions, but they still need to have some incentive to act. They need to have a personal benefit. They need to feel like recycling is the right thing to do and that it provides some direct benefit to them.

We also have to make it easy enough that it’s not too inconvenient so that they feel like the burden of driving over to the recycling center outweighs whatever benefit they might get from recycling that old television. And I think that’s something that’s really incumbent upon the industry to continue working on, is making recycling as easy as it possibly can be.

I’ve, many times when I’ve spoken at industry events have called for universal access to recycling, which to me means every single household has a recycling bin that’s right next to their trash bin, and it means that every public place where you throw your garbage has a recycling bin next to the garbage bin. I can go to Mexico on vacation, which I have not done in more than a year, but let’s say in a few more months I can go to Mexico on vacation, and I can see a recycling bin next to the garbage bin at the condo where I stay on the beach in Cancun. If they can offer that service at a condo in Cancun, certainly American cities can offer that to residents of the United States.

So, I think we just need to continue a little bit of the combination of consumer request and a little bit of soft political pressure to ensure that we have that universal access to recycling that makes it easy for people all across our country to do the right thing and put their packaging into the recycle bin.

Hagler

It sounds like there’s a responsibility on the consumer side. If we think about extended producer responsibility, there’s responsibility on the producer side. And then you also mentioned government, and perhaps there is a role for government to play as well to help solve some of these challenges. Let’s project forward, what do we see in the next three to five years as it comes to plastics and the circular economy?

Wooster

I think the biggest change we’re going to see in the next five years is that the demand from consumer-packaged goods companies for recycled content in their packaging is going to increase dramatically, both because of the commitments that they’ve made to the public and to various activist groups, but also because they have it in their strategies to provide packaging that contains more recycled content, and they genuinely want to do it.

I think that demand is going to fuel an investment in new capabilities among the producers. We’ve seen many announcements from across industry, different companies announcing investments in new technologies to increase their capacity to recycle plastics and make them back into new plastics, whether that’s through conventional mechanical recycling means, through solvent separation, through a variety of molecular or transformational recycling technologies that we like to call, collectively, “advanced recycling.”

I think we’re going to see an investment in new technologies that’s going to dramatically increase the availability, and also quality of material that’s available to the marketplace, that’s going to allow those consumer-packaged goods companies to use recycled content in many more packaging items than they’re able to do today.

Mattison

Jeff, the great thing is that we’re seeing some of those pilots now. We’re seeing innovative collaborations form and supply chains be formed around the idea of chemically recycled plastics and food grade products, and over the last year, we’ve actually had some retailers put products on the shelf.

Chris, I think where the market is heading is, like we have a label for recycling, there are competing certification bodies right now trying to find the label that consumers will understand as the label for recycled content. So how do they know this packaging they’ve picked up is full of 10%, or 20% or 50% recycled content? How can they trust that? We don’t have that yet, but part and parcel with what Jeff was saying about the advancement in technology, we’ll see an advancement in brands and consumer recognition as well.

Wooster

And beyond just what goes on the label, I think, is the traceability and accountability systems that companies will put in place in order to ensure that their supply chain is well understood and well managed. Companies need to manage their risk when it comes to their supply chain, so they want to know where material is coming from.

In the plastics, a value chain doesn’t have something in place similar to what the paper industry currently has for material from certified forests that are sustainably managed because plastics aren’t made in the forest. Right? Our raw materials don’t grow in the forest, maybe they did two million years ago, but they don’t grow in the forest today. So, we need a different system for accountability; but it can be a similar type of system, it just needs to look at different things.

And we need to be able to assure the brand companies, hey, this plastic that we have provided to you came from this cooperative, and here are the people that picked it up, and here are the working conditions that they have, and here’s how we make sure that they use the proper safety equipment, and here’s how we make sure that they don’t have abusive child labor practices, and here’s how we make sure that the product is safe and effective for you to use. And once you’re able to assure all those things and provide some chain of custody and some transparency around the traceability aspects of it, then I think the use of that material will grow dramatically and very quickly.

Hagler

It sounds to me, going forward, we’re going to need changing habits. So, whether those habits are consumer habits or how corporations think about using plastics, that there’s that mindset shift that needs to happen. One of the ways that mindset shift can happen is through better information and better accountability — better knowledge around all of these topics. And many people have a role to play in terms of improving that. I imagine there is still opportunity for new technologies and, Jamie, I expect you would say that we expect to see additional and continued partnerships between different organizations as well as we look forward in this circular economy. Is that right?

Mattison

Definitely in the collaborations. And I think there’s a lot of anticipation now around understanding the new administration’s agenda for plastics. With the passage of the Clean Seas Act last year, we certainly saw bipartisan support for focusing on marine debris; however, President Biden has in the past sort of called for stronger calls on restricting use of certain single-use plastics, a focus on environmental justice which is affecting approvals of plastic plants, and he’s called for this development of circular economies, which is close to where we’ve seen the EU being focused in the last few years. As we see some clearer articulation about what those goals are, those collaborations will again begin to formalize and strengthen.

Hagler

Jeff, any last words before we wrap up?

Wooster

Well, I’d just like to reiterate that I think it’s really, really important that everybody think about what role they can play and how they can work together to help drive a circular economy for plastics. I think that’s going to help us be more resource efficient; create a more sustainable future on our planet both by keeping materials out of the environment but also by reducing our need for resource extraction to manufacture new materials.

And it’s something that literally every consumer and every business can contribute toward. It is going to take a lot of work, it’s going to take a lot of innovation, it’s going to take a lot of new technology and some investment, but that’s part of the excitement. It makes it exciting to work in the space. I’ve been excited to work on this stuff for quite a while, and I look forward to continuing to do so. There’s a lot of opportunity out there, and it’s just going to take people keeping on it.

Hagler

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeff, Jamie. I’m so grateful that we’ve had the opportunity share your knowledge and experiences with EY audience. I really think this discussion has helped our listeners understand the actions that they can take to advance the circular use of plastics, so we can all continue to enjoy the benefits of plastics and enjoy the benefits of nature as well.

For more information about Dow circular economy initiatives, you can check out their website, which is at corporate.dow.com. And to EY listeners, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Please continue to tune in for more discussions on the sustainability topics that are impacting your organization today. On Twitter, please follow me @chrishagler and EY Sustainability Impact Hub @EY_Sustainable. And please subscribe to the Sustainability Matters podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much.