What’s in the way of recycling flexible plastics?

Flexible packaging is pretty miraculous. It’s incredibly lightweight, yet strong. It’s inexpensive and has a low carbon footprint. And it makes life more convenient (if you’re a parent, you know first-hand the time-saving relief of handing a toddler an applesauce pouch to feed themselves vs. sitting down with a toddler to spoon food into their defiant mouth). The challenge, of course, is what happens to it at the end of its use. Flexible packaging is often recyclable, but it’s estimated that only a very small percentage of it actually gets recycled in the U.S. (perhaps as low as 2%, according to The Recycling Partnership). That’s a problem for the planet. It’s also a problem for the packaging industry, since a couple of incoming EPR laws are looking to essentially ban flexible plastics because they don’t align with the desire to dramatically increase recycling rates. 

But we believe we can improve recycling rates of flexible plastics by motivating enough people to bring them to a store drop-off. 

ERM Shelton, along with the Flexible Film Recycling Alliance (FFRA) and Flexible Packaging Association (FPA), set out to explore this question by uncovering what’s in the way of people recycling their flexible plastics and what we could say that would motivate them. We have spent the last year working through a three-step process: 

1. Secondary research review: Learning what’s already been uncovered in research on this topic 
2. Ethnographic research: Observing behaviors and experiences vs. asking direct questions 
3. Survey research: Crafting messages and testing them, including what we observed in the ethnographies 

Here are the highlights of what we learned (I presented all of this recently at FlexForward; read more about it here). 

• While 91% of people in America claim they know what flexible plastics are, only 6% can describe them accurately. 
• 70% of people in America claim they regularly recycle at least one type of flexible plastics … but we know the recycling rate is more like 2%. We often see a say-do gap in consumer research, but that’s more like the Grand Canyon! Part of the reason for the gap in this case is that 53% think they can recycle flexible films curbside. Which is incorrect — flexibles can cause operational challenges in standard municipal recycling facilities, so they are usually not accepted.  
• Knowledge is power: Those who identify flexible plastics correctly and use the right language for them are more likely to say the proper way to recycle them is at store drop-off. 
• But the store drop-off experience can be confusing and, in some cases, poorly maintained. Through our ethnographic research, we got to understand what people see at store drop-off locations around the country. While some bins were neat, clean and clearly labeled, many weren’t — some looked more like trash cans than recycling bins, some had no signage at all, some were overflowing, and some were off to the side in a foreboding area of the parking lot.  
• Last but not least, we learned that the most effective messaging taps into personal empowerment with a tinge of urgency. 

The key takeaway is that if we want people to recycle their flexible plastics, we need to get the right target audiences using the same terminology, make it clear flexibles go back to the store, use messaging that leans into “it’s the right thing to do, now” and make the experience consistent and inviting. We’ve dreamed up a campaign approach that plays off human flexibility in an exaggerated way to make it clear what flexibles are and that it’s easy to recycle them. In fact, it’s not even a “stretch!” Look for more on this as we shift to testing the messaging in the real world. Our aim is to support the FFRA and FPA to increase flexible plastics recycling well beyond the 2% happening today. Stay tuned!