Thermoformer chases "chasing arrows" recycling symbol

Green coordinator kicks up dust pursuing thermoforms’ recyclability

By Kate Bachman

October 11, 2011

Dordan Manufacturing's Sustainability Manager Chandler Slavin is featured.

Dordan Manufacturing Co. produces thermoformed packaging, including clamshells, blisters, trays, and components, in its manufacturing plant in Woodstock, Ill. The thin-gauged, clear, rigid plastic packaging provides visibility of consumer products such as small electronics, housewares, hardwares, cosmetics, and medical instruments on retail displays while also enclosing and protecting them.

The family-owned and -operated manufacturer has anchored its position in a competitive industry by offering high-quality, customized packaging. Sophisticated in-house engineering and expert tooling departments support and accelerate production and enhance customer service.

That approach had sustained its success since its inception until a few years ago, when the packaging industry came under scrutiny by consumers and environmentalists for its perceived role in product cost and landfill waste. Thermoformed packaging is particularly vulnerable because it currently is not recycled postconsumer in the majority of American communities.

The knowledgeable and normally unflappable company CEO, Daniel Slavin, was being asked questions that he didn't know the answers to—not about thermoforming, engineering, or polymers, but about the company's sustainability initiatives, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel consumption, and environmental impact. Business opportunities could potentially be lost to companies producing packaging that was recyclable. The patriarch decided that it was in the company's best interest to incorporate sustainability into his plant.

That decision coincided with the graduation of his daughter, Chandler, from DePaul University in the spring of 2009 with a degree in ethics and social justice. A few months later, the graduate joined her father and brothers Aric and Sean in the family business her grandfather began in 1962 as its sustainability coordinator.

The 24-year-old Chandler Slavin is sweet, sunny, and bubbly, sprinkling her speech with age-typical jargon, her blogs with exclamation points. By the end of this interview, she had countered the eye-squinting, swelteringly hot day by throwing her hair up into a ponytail and donning red, star-shaped sunglasses.

It would be folly to mistake her youthfulness for flightiness, however.

She does serious work. She is a powerhouse in stilettos. Slavin has worked tirelessly to incorporate sustainability at Dordan Manufacturing and especially to try to convert the status of her family business's products at their end of life from landfill waste into recyclables. "The packages we make are too valuable to just throw away," she said.

She dared to ask the question that unfurled her long day's journey into night. Why isn't thermoformed packaging recycled?

Slavin had no idea how long and bumpy the road would become or how much fire she would draw. The young idealist kicked up a dust storm that blew all the way to Canada and settled over the entire packaging industry.

Starting Down the Path

1. Researched. Dordan Manufacturing sources recycled polyethylene terephthalate (R-PET), which is recycled from curbside-collected bottles and postindustrial scrap, as a raw material for much of its packaging. "It's one of the most cost-effective raw materials right now," Slavin said.

"We didn't understand ... if our plastic is made from recycled bottles, why can't it be recycled with bottles? It seemed so simple."

Armed with little more than a recent graduate's altruism and idealism, Slavin began to research the complexities of the recycling industry, determined to discover why thermoformed packaging is not accepted for recycling in most American communities and to seek a way to change that.

One of the first steps Slavin took as sustainability coordinator was to attend the Sustainable Packaging Coalition®'s annual membership meeting where she learned that thermoformed packaging usually ends up in a landfill along with most consumer product packaging materials.

Her next step was to visit and tour a local waste management facility with her brothers Aric and Sean. "They were really helpful in starting us along the path. We just wanted to learn what's involved in recycling and ask questions. That started the dialogue," she said.

"The most notable discovery was that our R-PET packages, which are certified as having a minimum 70 percent postindustrial content and can have up to 100 percent postconsumer content, moved through the optical sorting device at the recycling plant just like PET bottles. In other words, there was no optical difference between our R-PET packages and the bottle-grade PET."

Slavin began making inquiries of recycling companies, municipalities, and material and packaging manufacturers. "Many of my recycling and manufacturing contacts articulated that ... incorporating R-PET thermoforms into the existing PET bottle-recycling infrastructure was technically impossible due to different intrinsic viscosities (IV) melting temperatures and densities between bottle-grade PET and thermo-grade PET." She received contradictory information from other contacts.

Further research, discussions, and reading uncovered that a greater obstacle to recycling existed than material composition—age-old economics.

2. Blogged

While performing her research, Slavin blogged, www.recyclablepackaging.org, outlining her findings and venting her frustrations. She discovered that recyclability involves much more than the chemical composition of the plastic and how it is identified by optical scanners.

"It's weird how complicated the recycling structure is," she said.

Slavin posted updates regularly, including correspondence from industry organizations she had contacted. At each new twist and turn, she blogged, relaying the complexity of the recycling infrastructure, the challenges that arose, and ideas for a resolution.

In early 2010 her blog caught the attention of Walmart Canada's sustainable packaging coordinator, who had assembled a Material Optimization Committee while trying to find an outlet for several hard-to-place materials, including thermoform-grade PET. The committee was working to increase the diversion rates for PET packaging postconsumer waste.

3. Served on Walmart Canada Committee. Slavin was asked to participate in Walmart Canada's Material Optimization Committee. She was then asked to co-lead its PET Subcommittee.

While serving on the committee, Slavin was privy to information about Wamart's initiatives and those of other participants, including heavyweights National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) and the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. She also learned about, in greater depth, the mighty and multiple obstacles facing the recycling of thermoforms.

4. Published Report. By the end of 2010, Slavin compiled her findings and published a report, "The truth about plastic clamshell and blister recycling in America: With suggestions for the industry©." "This is stuff I learned through the research that I did. These aren't my own ideas, but it's cool to see that other people feel this way too."

Slavin's report exposed many of the obstacles to including thermoforms in the recycling infrastructure (see Recycling Report Highlights sidebar). Although the chemical composition of PET thermoforms is essentially the same as PET bottles, the different functions of the two packaging materials have resulted in some differences in IV melting point and some other characteristics. Those barriers are insignificant compared to the economic barriers, however, the report uncovered.

• First, there is the chicken-and-egg conundrum of supply and demand. A municipality will not begin collecting a material for recycling unless there is a buyer or end market for that material; however, there is not going to be a buyer/end market for a material if there is not a consistent quality and quantity available for recovery and reprocessing. While all packages are considered "recyclable," only those packages that are literally collected postconsumer and reprocessed in the majority of American communities can be labeled "recycled" as per the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) revised Green Guides.
  
  
• Sorting and identifying thermoforms in the recycling infrastructure is complicated by the fact that they come in many shapes and sizes, making them difficult to manually and visually identify. Also, the types of PET have proliferated to include recycled PET, new resins, biobased resins, and barrier resins.
  
  
• Many thermoforms are contaminated by labels and adhesives.
  
  
• Baling standards are deficient or nonexistent.
  Slavin's report outlined the conditions favoring thermoforms' recyclability too.
  
  
• About 1.4 billion lbs. of PET thermoforms were produced in North America in 2008, according to a www.plasticstoday.com article cited in the report. Some estimate that figure to be as high as 5.8 billion lbs. Both figures exceed the 400 million lbs. that the American Chemistry Council sets as a minimum for the material to be recycled profitably.
  
  
• The composition of thermoforms is transitioning from PVC to PET because of the perceived negative environmental profile of PVC and overseas mandates as a result. This increases the amount of thermo-grade PET available for recovery.
  
  
• The demand for recycled PET outpaces the supply by 3-to-1.

Slavin composed a list of action items that could change the dynamics. Developing more efficient sorting systems, both visually and automatically, for thermoforms ranks high on the list.

"I had the hardest time getting the information I needed to write that paper. Everything was proprietary, and no one wanted to talk about it," Slavin said.

"Though I was really focusing on the thermoform industry and the problem of its products not being readily recycled, I also intended it as an analogy for a lot of packaging materials, because a lot of what people think is recycled is not."

The report was downloaded thousands of times and picked up by several publications.

5. Presented Findings. After her report was published, Slavin was invited to speak about her findings at the Sustainable Plastics Packaging and Sustainability in Packaging conferences. "It was the coolest thing that I got to speak at these two conferences. It was the first time I felt like the work I had done was worth presenting, and the reception was awesome. I was just really excited to start the dialogue," she said. "Once I had presented my findings, people were actually interested and asking me questions. I was like, 'We're just packaging people. We don't know about waste management. It's not like this is our forte.'"

Progress, Results

Although the journey is not concluded, happily, progress is being made toward getting nonbottle, rigid PET recycled and recyclable, Slavin relayed. Although she declined to take credit for the progress, many of the actions being taken are those she recommended in her report.

Industry organizations are working together to make thermoformed packaging and rigid, nonbottle PET plastic recyclable. The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) just teamed up with NAPCOR. "They're the organization that established the bottled water recycling infrastructure—and they just came out with $100,000 grant money to award whoever has the best approach for development of a model PET thermoform recycling program. So that's happening," she said.

"Canadian retailers are now mandating that all thermoforms be manufactured from PET to increase the material available for recovery and simplify the waste stream." This establishment of a single material, and a recyclable resin rather than PVC, is expected to facilitate thermoform recycling. "We're seeing a shift from PVC to R-PET [recycled PET] because of all the conversion in Europe, and it's funneling into North America," she said.

Efforts are being made in the thermoform packaging industry to establish design-for-recyclability guidelines similar to those for PET bottle recycling, Slavin said. The Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers (APR) and NAPCOR are working with adhesive and thermoform manufacturers to develop adhesives that support recycling efforts. "After doing all this pilot work, they discovered that the adhesive used on thermoform packaging labels wasn't getting removed, and that would gunk up the whole bale and render it unmarketable. So now the adhesives and thermoform manufacturers are working with APR to develop and use labels and adhesives that will allow thermoforms to be recycled along with PET bottles," she said. "So that's really exciting."

In March of this year APR issued the first two of seven baling specifications for nonbottle, rigid plastics, which it hopes will help increase the recycling of those materials.

The APR also reported that because consumer product brand-name companies are pushing for more recycled content, curbside collection has increased, and the amount of material recycled in 2009 increased by 30 percent from 2008.

Taking the Heat

Because Chandler Slavin publicized her revelations openly, and because of her passionate defense of plastic packaging, she took some heat on several fronts: industry trade groups, other packaging industries, customers, and even the recycling industry.

"I've gotten slapped on the hand a couple times for being as out there as I've been. Because I had done the research and I had the facts, I took it upon myself to put it out there. I'm young and idealistic, so I was surprised by the effect I had," Chandler said.

The first wave of criticism came from simply exposing the fact that plastic thermoformed packaging is not currently recycled. The impudence!

"The thermoform industry has been somewhat conservative. Most have been OK with the status quo. That wasn't working for us. We were just trying to be honest.

"A representative of a trade association asked, 'Why are you putting it out there that this isn't recyclable?' like it was a faux pas," Slavin relayed. "It's something they wanted to keep under the radar until they developed a solution."

The issue was already available from public resources such as the U.S. EPA, she contended, and added, "We've lost business because some people have the perception that clamshells are so terrible. So it's in our business interest to develop an argument. I was just trying to defend my company. But I ticked off some people."

In addition, exposing the issue alerted some customers who previously had been unaware. "They were like, 'your packaging is not recycled?'"

Another line of fire came from competing packaging industries. "There's a lot of 'paper versus plastic' in packaging for some reason," Slavin said. "I responded to an article on a social media Web site in the discussion thread. The article was written in a misinformed way. It wasn't reporting. I poked holes in some of the assumptions that were made. The sustainability director of that company called me at home and told me that I have to be careful what I say and where I say it.

"They [the paper packaging industy] have done such an awesome job representing their industry and communicating a positive story around fiber-based products that I feel like, why haven't we done as good of a job? Why am I the only one standing up and defending plastics? This industry shouldn't always have to be on the defense. We have a great story to tell that when actively communicated can combat the misrepresentation of plastic products.

"In my opinion, I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm doing my job as the sustainability coordinator of a plastic packaging manufacturing firm, but there's a lot more at play than I realized initially. These are the things you learn as a new person in any industry.

"I'm taking a much more proactive approach, so when articles come out saying, 'So and so is switching from clamshell packaging into this type of packaging; it's so much more sustainable,' I'm like, 'Is it more sustainable? Because according to the life cycle analysis of it, it's not ...'"

The Long, Unwinding Road

The long road for thermoforms to become recyclable keeps unwinding. Slavin persists down the path and is encouraged that the fight is being fought by others as well. Along the way, she has gained a broader perspective on packaging's role in sustainability.

"I think my understanding of ethics and ethical discourse has informed the way in which I assess sustainability, especially from a marketing standpoint. I understand companies that are looking to become sustainable, because it's about identifying with the values of the customer."

Dordan Manufacturing Co., 2025 S. Castle Road, Woodstock, IL 60098, 815-334-0087, cslavin@dordan.com, www.dordan.com.