The idea occurred to Nick Paget, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Meadow, a packaging technology company headquartered in Stockholm. While he couldn’t quite imagine a consumer going for that kind of a shampoo container, he was on to something. The result is the Kapsul technology – a new but familiar user experience that turns the ubiquitous aluminum can into a vessel for household products, such as shampoo or cleaning sprays, that is used along with a dispenser. “It’s still can enough where people put it in the recycling, but it’s not can enough where people think it’s a beverage,” Paget says. 

The aluminum beverage can is one of the most recyclable packaging options available. It requires 95% less energy to produce recycled compared to new aluminum, according to European Aluminium, an industry association representing the entire aluminum value chain in Europe. Aluminum cans that are repeatedly recycled don’t suffer the same quality loss as other materials, such as plastic. On top of that, aluminum  cans take only about 60 days to recycle for reuse. 

“They’re really scalable. They’re available everywhere. People know how to recycle them. You don’t need to change human behaviour, which is always the hardest thing,” Paget says. “And the best thing is we don’t need to invent it.” 

Meadow’s timing could be exactly right. As regulations in many countries tighten and companies bear more responsibility for the waste they create, Meadow’s solution is one that’s available, scalable, familiar and could help ease the transition to more recyclable materials while cutting costs. That is, if the systems and collective will are in place. 

To reimagine the aluminum can for household products, Meadow removed the beverage can’s pull tab, and with it extra material needed for can production. The top of the can was redesigned so that the product inside wouldn’t be accidentally mistaken for a canned beverage and consumed. However, the overall can-ness still remains, Paget says, as beverage cans require such extreme precision so they don’t leak or explode, which is why aluminum manufacturing companies sometimes serve both packaging and aerospace markets. 

The can then fits into a dispenser so that someone with the grip strength of an average 80-year-old woman could use it with ease, Paget says. The top of the dispenser changes depending on the product, such as a pump or a spray nozzle, and could be designed and branded. Once the product runs out, the idea is that the can is recycled and replaced by another aluminum can. “If you could turn off the tap,” he says, “why deal with the waste?” For Paget, it’s more efficient and exciting to deal with upstream innovation and prevent more waste from entering the system. 

Circularity in motion

Europe is doubling down on its circular-economy leadership. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which entered into force in February 2025, regulates what packaging is allowed in EU markets as well as waste-management and -prevention measures; for example, design requirements that reduce the amount of excess packaging, minimum amounts of recycled content for various types of plastic packaging and recycling targets for different materials.   

Having a circular system assumes that waste will re-enter the system. But when it comes to relying on waste, “you need to have sufficient quality in a sufficient amount,” says Stig Irving Olsen, associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, whose research focuses on environmental assessments of products and systems. Turning aluminum beverage cans back into cans, instead of using mixed aluminum scrap, reduces impacts on the climate, according to a study co-authored by Olsen. 

While there are general complexities when it comes to recycling aluminum cans, such as impurities from the decorative cover, there is no technical reason why companies using Meadow’s technology couldn’t be integrated into existing recycling systems, Paget says.  

Simplifying the infrastructure

“What’s often missed is that you need an entire collection infrastructure,” says Clarissa Morawski, CEO of Reloop, an international non-profit working on waste reduction and promoting a circular economy. Recycling infrastructure needs more than just somewhere to collect packaging. It usually requires cooperation between many different players: companies, producers of packing materials, regulatory bodies, industry associations, retailers, collection services or sites and, of course, consumers who are willing to recycle. 

“If you’re in the business of refill, and you’re putting a fleet of bottles, nice refillable containers, they are an asset,” Morawski says. “You’ve invested in them. Your business plan is based on getting it back, washing it, refilling it, getting it back out to the customer, and then scaling it up.” 

Beyond Meadow, there are many examples of refillables being tested. In the United Kingdom, supermarket chains Aldi and Ocado completed a pilot project offering basic products in refillable containers, such as pasta, rice or washing liquids, that could be returned in-store or to a driver if groceries were delivered. Some beauty brands have in-store stations where customers can refill containers after the product is finished, often offered at a discounted price. Having incentives, such as discounts, can play an important role in the overall success of return rates. 

Deposit return systems are one of the most effective ways to ensure that packaging is recycled. For example, in Sweden, consumers pay a deposit on plastic and aluminum beverage containers at checkout. When finished, shoppers can return the packaging to more than 3,100 grocery stores nationwide or at designated drop-off points for money or vouchers at the grocery store, or choose to donate the returns to charity. In 2024, Sweden had an 87.6% recycling rate for plastic and aluminum bottles, one of the highest return rates in the world. When recycling is easy for consumers, similar deposit-return systems have yielded similar results, so long as the deposit is worthwhile. In Canada, return rates jump from a median of 68% when the deposit is less than 10 cents to 92% when the deposit is 20 cents or more. 

A shift in responsibility 

Even if consumers are willing to participate, buy-in is needed from every recycling player at every step. For instance, Aldi deemed the refillables pilot an in-store success and had high return rates even without a deposit system. However, the company decided not to scale the solution, citing the inability to test it in multiple retailers. In Ontario, the Beer Store closures have meant the loss of many bottle collection sites and concerns about the future of the entire bottle deposit-return program. “All the intentions may be right, but if you don’t have the right collection system in place, you’re out of luck. You’re out of business,” Morawski says. 

Even if a good collection system exists in one place, recycling regulations vary between jurisdictions. If a bottle of beer is sold in Oregon, the bottle must be returned in state. The same applies to Canadian provinces, countries in Europe and most other places you might travel with your otherwise recyclable waste. In Europe, the new EU packaging regulation outlines that its countries should do more to make deposit systems speak to each other but stops short of specifics, Morawski says. In places where there is a lot of cross-border travel, this could help improve recycling rates and prevent unnecessary waste. 

All the intentions may be right, but if you don’t have the right collection system in place, you’re out of luck. You’re out of business.

– Clarissa Morawski, CEO, Reloop

While there are several examples of success and good intentions, new regulations could hasten the establishment of more effective systems. The EU packaging waste regulation outlines several stricter regulations, including that all member states establish deposit-return systems on plastic and metal beverage cans by 2029. The U.K. government’s extended producer responsibility for packaging will place the responsibility of paying for the collection, sorting and treatment of waste entirely on the producers. The Government of Canada has also issued a strategy on zero plastic waste. In other words, companies will soon have no choice but to deal with their waste.  

Forward thinking about waste was also something Paget noticed and helped Meadow conceptualize as it was being founded back in 2020. It wasn’t just start-ups or tier-one companies; companies of all sizes are looking for these solutions, Paget says. To ensure that its technology is readily available to companies, Meadow established partnerships along its value chain, such as with Ball Corporation, which holds more than 30% of the aluminum can market in North America, Europe and South America; Novelis, the world leader in aluminum rolling and recycling; and Fillsy, a manufacturing factory in Poland.  

When it comes to getting customers to adopt a refillable model, Paget points out that packaging fails when it tries to become the product. For example, compare the experience of using a travel coffee mug with using a paper one. “Does anyone really love the experience of drinking through a plastic lid with a tiny hole in it and your coffee tastes like paper?” Paget says. Consumers have already shown that they are willing to pay for a better design and product experience, if the recent massive annual sales of some refillable drinkware companies are any indication. 

What Meadow hopes to do is to bring that same consumer behaviour to household products while reducing waste. Use aluminum for the refillable portions so it can be repeatedly recycled. Use plastic or other strong materials for the dispenser, which should last for a long time and not break when you drop it in your shower. Paget now knows that aluminum has place in the shower — and it takes Meadow’s innovation to crack open the can. 

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm. 

The post The aluminum can books a starring role in the circular economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The company’s board replaced the CEO and CFO in a decision announced May 1, when Li-Cycle publicized that it was looking for buyers. A potential deal with mining giant and lead creditor Glencore evidently had not come to fruition: Two weeks later, a Canadian bankruptcy court appointed Alvarez & Marsal Canada Securities to oversee a sale of Li-Cycle’s assets. A Li-Cycle spokesperson referred Canary Media to the company’s public bankruptcy announcements.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June. In the meantime, Glencore has loaned $10.5 million to keep things going during the proceedings. Glencore also entered a ​“stalking horse” offer of $40 million for most of Li-Cycle’s holdings, setting a floor for bidding (if any other investors want a piece of the action). Glencore could emerge with a real deal on its hands, but it won’t be recouping the $275 million it previously invested in Li-Cycle.

“The Company represents a compelling investment opportunity, uniquely positioned to benefit from rapid growth in the battery materials and [lithium-ion battery] recycling market, amid increasing global focus on sustainability and critical raw material supply chain resilience,” Alvarez & Marsal pitch in a flyer for the sale.

That ​“compelling” opportunity amounts to five battery shredding plants, a massive unfinished recycling centre in western New York, and a business predicated on the growth of a nascent North American EV supply chain that currently faces far-reaching disruption from the Trump administration. A buyer would not be able to fully recycle any batteries without spending a few hundred million dollars more, and even then, it’s not clear they would make any money doing so.

The start-up’s collapse underscores the struggles of the fledgling battery-recycling industry in general. A few years ago, the sector was flush with venture capital and charting out rapid timelines for commercializing breakthrough technologies that would enable the transition to EVs while minimizing mining. The sector was also seen as a way to achieve the bipartisan goal of reducing dependence on China, which dominates the global battery supply chain.

Li-Cycle was founded in Canada in 2016 and went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC (generally a red flag for early-stage cleantech companies). Its engineers developed a technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs while they’re submerged in liquid; this prevented fires and saved considerable effort compared with painstakingly discharging and dismantling the packs for processing.

Li-Cycle successfully built five ​“spoke” facilities to collect and shred whole EV battery packs, turning them into the powdery mixture known as black mass. The spoke operations have paused in Arizona, Alabama, New York and Ontario, while a German outpost continues to function during bankruptcy proceedings. Collectively, these facilities can break down up to 40 kilotons of batteries a year.

The spokes were supposed to feed their black mass to Li-Cycle’s hub in Rochester, New York, which would refine it and isolate useful battery materials to reintroduce into the supply chain. This never came to pass because Li-Cycle halted construction in fall 2023, citing runaway costs. It became clear that Li-Cycle needed to find a lot more cash to complete the nearly two-million-square-foot site.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June.

The company hoped for a lifeline from the Biden-era Department of Energy: in November, its Loan Programs Office finalized a $475-million loan for Li-Cycle to complete the recycling hub. But Li-Cycle never drew on that federal money because it couldn’t secure additional private funding to hold in reserve, as stipulated in the loan terms.

Li-Cycle is not the only battery recycling firm in a tough spot. Since last year, a number of challenges have beset the industry.

The adjacent U.S. EV sector has seen slower growth than expected, which has in turn reduced the urgency of building out a North American battery supply chain. Core battery materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt have plummeted in price, lessening the value of whatever recyclers might glean. And battery makers have increasingly turned to lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based chemistries, further reducing the value of recycling these batteries.

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In the past year, a fire destroyed the largest battery-shredding plant in the United States, Interco’s Critical Mineral Recovery site in Missouri. Reno, Nevada–based Aqua Metals ran low on funds and laid off staff while it searched for financing to build a commercial-scale recycling line. Ascend Elements delayed construction of its flagship recycling plant in Kentucky, citing a customer’s decision to postpone buying the recycled materials. In March, Ascend cancelled plans to make cathode active materials in Kentucky to focus on precursor materials and lithium carbonate.

Redwood Materials is the rare bright spot. The venture by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel raised a couple billion dollars and has been building out a major compound in the desert outside Reno, not far from Tesla’s factory there. In 2024, Redwood Materials broke down 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries and earned $200 million in revenue from recycled materials.

The industry’s challenges come as the Trump administration says it aims to expand U.S. mineral supplies. Paradoxically, the administration has taken steps to undermine the fledgling U.S. EV and battery industries, which are the big drivers of demand growth for rare earth metals. The budget bill passed by the House last week would strip tax incentives for EV purchases and battery installations, weakening demand for the domestic supply chain that recyclers like Li-Cycle hoped to serve – and making the tough road for recycling firms even tougher.

This article was first published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

The post How Li-Cycle went from battery-recycling darling to the brink of bankruptcy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Under a new blue-box program developed in partnership with a provincially established non-profit called Circular Materials, residents of London, Ontario, can drop their used pods, which are made with an aluminum mesh and frame, in a special bag that comes in the Nespresso package. Then they put the sack in the blue bin on recycling days. The spent pods are collected and sent to one of three recycling facilities, where the coffee and the casing are separated. The aluminum is compacted and shredded, and then sent to a smelter to be reprocessed.

According to the company, the program has been rolled out in hundreds of communities across Canada. “Nespresso Canada currently pays the entire costs of the capsule recycling program,” a spokesperson says. “This approach does not generate any costs for residents or municipalities.”

This venture, so far, is a small but revealing example of an important shift taking place when it comes to waste diversion. For decades, most Canadian and U.S. municipalities have operated blue-box programs, charging residents and some businesses for the service through taxes or fees. But diversion rates remain stubbornly low, and a lot of contaminated material that gets tossed in blue bins finds its way to landfills.

All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate, we’re seeing take hold now with plastic pollution.

– Rick Smith, executive director, Canadian Climate Institute

The “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) model, popular in much of Europe, places the financial burden squarely in the laps of producers. The thinking is that the industries affected will be motivated to find or develop new end markets or reduce packaging to avoid landfill fees. 

The producer-pays model propels innovation

Early this year, Quebec producers and packagers formally assumed responsibility for waste gathered from municipal blue-box programs – the latest Canadian jurisdiction to shift its recycling services to EPR. 

Ontario is in the midst of its own EPR transition, setting up “producer responsibility organizations” to manage different portions of the blue-box waste streams. 

Sarah King, who heads Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign, points out that Recycle B.C., the oldest and most highly regarded EPR program in North America, has built an encouraging track record. Created in 2014 by the province’s Ministry of Environment, the not-for-profit reported that for 2023, 43% of plastics were sold to end markets, while the agency has established a partnership with GFL, the waste-management giant, to invest in new recycling infrastructure and technology. 

EPR, King says, “can have really positive impacts in terms of eliminating problematic materials and formats.” Yet, she offers up cautions: “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that it’s really focused on transferring collection and recycling [away from municipalities] as opposed to reducing overall waste generation. It’s not a replacement for eliminating or banning certain types of plastics or materials.”

The transformation of high-profile recycling programs coincides with a boom in research and development and business innovation when it comes to waste materials. Herewith, some notable case studies. 

1. Building in reverse through deconstruction

Construction and demolition waste remains a black box in the recycling world, as is true of much of the so-called IC&I (industrial, commercial and institutional) waste stream, of which only about 12% is diverted from landfill in Ontario, according to the Council of the Great Lakes Region. The United States, in turn, generates 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition debris annually, about a quarter of which goes to landfill. The rest, such as scrap metal, is diverted. 

Meredith Moore, an interior designer originally from New York, belongs to a growing movement within the contracting business. Her Toronto firm, Ouroboros, provides “deconstruction” services to renovators, essentially salvaging and reselling materials that normally end up in industrial waste bins: old studs, asphalt shingles, flooring and so on. The firm grew out of a home reno she and her partner completed during the pandemic and was inspired, in part, by the sight of so many overflowing bins in front of homes getting makeovers, she says. “I was just pretty much blown away by the amount of really wonderful materials that were being tossed out.” 

“Deconstruction is basically building a home in reverse,” Moore explains. “The last things that you’re putting in are going to be your baseboards, kitchen, appliances. All of that gets salvaged. Then we go on to the flooring, and that gets salvaged. Once we get to the drywall, that goes to recycling partners or gets disposed of. There are still not really any great options for fibreglass insulation for recycling right now. Then, once we get back to the stud walls, we basically work from the top down.” Ouroboros can achieve 90% diversion on most projects.

A growing number of municipal, state and provincial jurisdictions have established deconstruction rules, including places like Seattle, Washington, and San Antonio, Texas, where deconstruction is required or regulated. In Ontario, salvaged lumber – which is often much sturdier than what’s on offer at Home Depot – has to be regraded, per the provincial building code. Initially, that rule was a significant impediment to finding buyers, but Moore developed an approach that allows her to sell salvaged beams and studs to homebuilders. 

As for the business model, she says there’s still a cost premium for deconstruction services, even after factoring in revenues from resold materials. But Moore has figured out how to reduce that price differential by providing charitable-donation receipts for salvaged scrap that the homeowner can donate. Under those conditions, “we become, on par, less expensive than demolition.”

2. Stopping plastic pollution from synthetic fabrics

As of January 2025, France became the first country to mandate the installation of microfibre filters in washing machines – a move that will reduce the leaching of microplastics into the water system. 

European Union data shows that plastic microfibres in textiles are responsible for 15% to 31% of the 9.5 million tonnes of plastics that end up in the world’s oceans each year. In the United States, according to a 2019 literature review published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, textiles accounted for 6% of all municipal waste in 2014, of which only about 16% was recycled. (A few jurisdictions, like Markham, Ontario, offer or mandate textile recycling.)

A 2024 study by Ocean Diagnostics and the Rainforest Conservation Foundation found that annually about 1,920 tonnes of microfibres find their way into the environment from Canadian laundry activities, with almost 400 tonnes released into the air via dryers, with the balance in treated wastewater and biosolids used in farming and forestry. 

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Concerns about synthetic fabrics have escalated dramatically in recent years with the advent of fast fashion, as well as the growing popularity of blended materials that include both natural and synthetic fibres that enable clothing to be stretchier. A U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study released last December estimated that 60% of textiles made today include plastics and cited Environmental Protection Agency studies showing a 50% increase in textile waste between 2000 and 2018.

Some brands – Canada’s Frank and Oak, Patagonia, and Finland’s Pure Waste – now promote either all-natural textiles or products made from post-consumer recycled fabrics. Lululemon last year introduced products made from “enzymatically recycled” polyester. End-of-life diversion, however, has had limited success because clothing and textiles are not allowed in most blue-box programs. Used synthetics that go to landfill or incinerators release greenhouse gases and leachates that shunt microplastics into lakes, rivers and oceans, soil, micro-organisms and, ultimately, human bodies. 

While some textile-recycling facilities now deploy hand-held devices that use infrared scanning to identify different types of fabrics, these technologies don’t solve the blended-fabric problem, and, as the GAO report goes on to note, advanced textile-recycling technology is still in its infancy. 

A US$1.28-million research study, commissioned by Goodwill and funded by Walmart’s philanthropic arm, seems to support that conclusion. Conducted at four regional textile hubs in the United States and Canada serving 28 Goodwill divisions, the two-year pilot concluded that 60% of the material studied – cottons, blends and polyster – could be reprocessed with existing recycling technologies.

While such findings are encouraging, regulations to mandate microfibre filters in washing machines will likely be more effective at reducing microplastic pollution well before clothing is thrown out. Just don’t dump your accumulated lint down the drain after collecting it. Better yet, experts say: dry your clothes on a line. 

3. Recovering EV battery materials through ‘direct recycling’

The surge in sales of electric vehicles in recent years foreshadows a similar surge in EV battery recycling as all those vehicles begin to reach the end of their lives. Battery metals and components like cathodes and anodes can then be reprocessed and cycled back into battery production. 

But the traditional means for salvaging these materials rely on high heat (smelting), chemicals or water, producing by-products that harm the environment, including greenhouse gases, acid leachate and an abundance of sodium sulfate, a cast-off compound that’s harmful in high concentrations. For every tonne of battery metals, conventional recycling produces 800 kilograms of this salt-like powder, which is difficult to dispose of and has few further commercial uses. Chinese battery recyclers sell it for use in detergent, while North American and European firms pay to dispose of it. “There’s not really an industry for this material,” says Beatrice Browning, a senior recycling analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a global EV supply chain consultancy. 

“In the competitive battery industry, the difference between sodium sulfate being a sellable product and a cost centre for disposal is one of the main reasons why battery producers in the U.S. and Europe can’t compete on cost with Chinese battery companies,” says Micha Ben-Naim, a scientist and investor with Boston-based Clean Energy Ventures. 

Browning points to the emergence of “direct recycling,” a simplified process for salvaging the various components of a spent battery without shredding the modules. “The direct recycling process’s easy scale-up is expected to generate higher revenue due to higher material recovery and few processing steps,” a team of researchers from India, Singapore and France concluded in a study released last year. 

Several start-ups are now working in this emerging market, Browning says: Kyburz, a Swiss EV company with a battery recycling division; Princeton NuEnergy, which has raised US$55 million and is now building a commercial-scale plant in South Carolina; and Ascend Elements, which has raised more than US$700 million in recent years and signed a 2023 deal to supply recycled battery materials to Honda. Clean Energy Ventures, meanwhile, recently led a US$8-million seed round, to be invested in Aepnus Technologies, a California firm commercializing a sodium sulfate recycling technology. 

Unlike conventional methods, direct recycling doesn’t produce the black mass that’s used to produce cathodes. That’s an advantage, because it eliminates the need to ship black mass to Asia for reprocessing, Browning notes. “The aim is to try and localize the whole supply chain.” 

4. Replacing plastics with new biodegradable materials

At some point this year, the UN member nations will resume a long-delayed negotiation over the implementation of a global treaty, adopted in 2022, to end plastics pollution. Even without the environmental hostility and climate denialism of the Trump administration, the goal remains elusive. 

For decades, plastic packaging has been the Achilles heel of the recycling industry. With a few exceptions (e.g., fleece made from recycled bottles), plastic is stubbornly resistant to circular applications for a range of familiar reasons: the proliferation of single-use plastics, inadequate sorting, mixed and contaminated feedstock, and simply the skyrocketing quantity of plastic packaging.

Veteran plastics researcher Rick Smith, executive director of the Canadian Climate Institute, says that new recycling technology won’t alter this narrative; rather, he predicts, the trajectory of plastics use will yield to rapidly emerging insights about the health impacts. Microplastics “are widely distributed throughout the natural environment, with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization,” the authors of a wide-ranging literature review published last year in Science observed. “They are pervasive in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects.” 

Smith points out that the microplastics debate today is where the climate crisis discourse was a generation ago. “All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate – the increasing awareness that climate change is not some sort of notional concern for our grandchildren, but a proximate threat to human security in the here and now – we’re seeing take hold now, just in the last year, with plastic pollution. For a plastics company, there’s no way you’re going to explain away the horrible, increasing scientific evidence that small plastic particles have penetrated every human body on Earth.”

Those revelations, he predicts, “will drive incredible new solutions in terms of non-toxic new materials and truly biodegradable plastic-type materials. That’s happening quickly, but we’re not there yet.”

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post Four ways that recycling is finally changing for the better appeared first on Corporate Knights.

NPR went with “Plastic Junk: Researchers Find Tiny Particles in Men’s Testicles.” EHN wrote “Microplastics Found in the Testicles of Both Man and Man’s Best Friend” (picking up on the fact that the study in question measured both human and dog samples). Last week, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert implored his audience to “Recycle your testicles! They can be ground up and made into new soda bottles.”

But though some of the commentary was tongue-in-cheek, the subject matter of the study that provoked the headlines couldn’t have been more serious. In a selection of human testicles from New Mexico, all samples had measurable levels of microplastics, representing 12 different types of plastic. The researchers speculated that the presence of these toxic particles in male reproductive organs might be driving declines in male fertility, which has halved around the world over the past 50 years, with the pace of decline more than doubling since 2000.

Though this study is the first prominent one to find plastic pollution in this most personal and unlikely of locations, it’s only the latest research to find that plastic pollution has become so ubiquitous, so overwhelmingly common, that it’s actually penetrating our own bodies. In the last few years, scientists have found microplastics in human breast milk, human blood and human lungs, to name only a few. In a March 2024 issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, scientists announced they had detected microplastics clogging the arteries of heart and stroke patients for the first time. And in the new documentary film Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics (which I have the honour of executive producing), we reveal new evidence showing, for the first time, microplastics in the human brain. The researchers behind this groundbreaking work are now investigating possible links between this pollution and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

For the moment, the problem is getting worse, not better. Late last year, scientists in Hawaii showed that levels of microplastics in human placentas have increased over the past decade: a clear outcome of our society’s accelerating plastic addiction. An incredible 50% of all plastic produced by humans has been created in the past 15 years. Less than 10% of this is recycled, and the vast majority winds up jettisoned into the environment. Over time, bigger pieces of plastic (like disposable water bottles) degrade into tiny particles that are then so light we inhale and ingest them on a minute-by-minute basis.

To put it mildly, this recent but rapidly mounting evidence of a causal connection between plastic pollution and negative impacts on human health is a game changer.

Throughout history, different types of pollution problems have started to be solved only once they were clearly understood to be impinging on our quality of life. That’s why lead was removed from gasoline (it was shown to be harming the brain development of kids). That’s why the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper banned BPA in baby bottles (it’s not a good idea to make baby bottles out of a hormonally active chemical). And that’s why coal plants are being shut down (more smog means more asthma and heart disease).

The same moment of truth is now here for plastic pollution.

Endangered sea turtles are mistakenly eating plastic grocery bags? I’m concerned.

My wife has plastic in her placenta? I have plastic in my testicles? Make it stop.

Unsurprisingly, given that eight out of 10 Canadians support a crackdown on plastic pollution, the federal government has been moving to solve the problem. It banned a number of single-use, easy-to-replace, plastic items and is now constructing a common-sense registry to better track how much plastic is being created and disposed of.

Retailers are also acting. You know something serious is happening when Tim Hortons starts modifying its iconic packaging. I can confirm, from personal experience, that their new cardboard coffee cup lids work very well with my double-double.

The smart play for the plastic industry, now, is to start reducing its risk. This month’s blockbuster testicle headlines are the tip of the iceberg. Rather than stonewalling all new regulation, as Canada’s plastic sector has been, there is plenty of room for the industry to proactively make plastic safer. To do so will require banning the most toxic plastic formulations and reducing surges in production that are swamping efforts to find solutions.

We’re not recycling our way out of this problem. The scientific evidence could not be more clear and worrisome: plastic pollution is a human health hazard and a threat to our future. Hopefully, our self-preservation instinct kicks in any second now.

Rick Smith is executive producer of the new documentary Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics and the co-author of two bestselling books on the human health impacts of pollution. He is also president of the Canadian Climate Institute.

The post The moment of truth is now here for plastic pollution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.”

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI.

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco.

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned.

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.

 

– Richard Wiles, president of Center for Climate Integrity

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries.

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing.

This article originally appeared in Grist. 

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post How the plastic industry lied about recycling for decades appeared first on Corporate Knights.

According to Sims’s latest climate report, every tonne of scrap used for steel production avoids 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions compared to producing steel from raw materials. The savings, Mikkelsen says, “are enormous” and added up to a savings of 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2023 alone – equivalent to removing almost three million gas-powered cars from the road for a year.

Mikkelsen also likes to say that Sims – the top-ranked firm on the Corporate Knights 2024 Global 100 list of the world’s most sustainable publicly traded corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue – is not a Johnny-come-lately to the circular economy in general and the business of decarbonizing steel in particular. “We weren’t late to this party,” he says. “We were sending out invitations 100 years ago.”

The iron and steel business is a major contributor to the climate crisis. Globally, this industry generates about 7% to 9% of all anthropogenic emissions, or about 2.6 billion tonnes per year, according to World Steel, an industry body. The sector, moreover, isn’t on track to achieve net-zero targets, despite investments in new forms of low-carbon energy for steel plants. As the International Energy Agency reports, “the current pipeline of low- and near zero-emission projects falls short of what is required to meet the [net-zero] scenario, and high-emission projects” – which is to say, coal-fired steel – “make up around two-thirds of all announced projects worldwide.” 

Recycling scrap, in short, makes more sense than ever, although the process, which involves smelting and other energy-intensive processes, also needs to boost its environmental performance.

Among the firms operating in this vertical, Sims scores highly. It earned the top spot on the Global 100, with 100% sustainable revenue and clean investments, a 95% score on the energy productivity of its operations, and 87.5% on its carbon productivity. The company also ranks highly on a range of social metrics – low employee turnover, for example, and strong gender diversity at both the board and C-suite levels. Mikkelsen adds that the firm has pushed to reduce carbon in its own operations, setting a target of 2025 to transition entirely to the use of renewable energy in its shredding and separating operations, as well as longer-term goals, such as becoming carbon neutral by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Its environmental track record is not, however, pristine. In 2022, a B.C.-based metal recycling firm in which Sims owns a stake was slapped with a provincial clean-up order related to the discharge of PCB- and heavy-metal-saturated effluent into the Fraser River; the company is fighting the order in court. The firm has also faced media scrutiny and regulatory action in the U.S. related to air pollution from one of its smelting facilities in the Chicago area. Sims’s 2022 sustainability report notes that the company has sought to comply with state environmental rules by investing US$15 million in an emissions-control system. 

At a high level, Mikkelsen’s pitch to investors is that scrap metal – steel, copper, aluminum, et cetera – has a bright future in the low-carbon economy, thanks to steadily rising demand for electric vehicles, wind turbines, electricity transmission grids, solar panels. “All of those are steel intensive, copper intensive, aluminum intensive.” He points also to the steady growth in the number of metal recycling plants that are either coming online or in the planning stages, in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and elsewhere. Even countries that traditionally exported scrap metal, like Japan, are building electricity-fired processing  plants. 

But the expansion of demand for recycled metals isn’t immune to market fluctuations. In the past year, global demand for copper has dropped, and the slowing of the Chinese economy has sent ripples through international metal markets. The price of unprocessed scrap, meanwhile, has risen, which means companies like Sims have faced something of a financial squeeze, a dynamic that’s clearly visible in its latest earnings reports. The company generated US$8 billion in revenues in 2023 but saw its profits plunge by 72.9%.

Mikkelsen dismisses these trends as little more than background noise. “We look through the short-term swings and roundabouts of business life,” he says. “The longer-term trend we anticipate is that scrap metal is in short supply.”

We weren’t late to this party. We were sending out invitations 100 years ago.

 

– Stephen Mikkelsen, CEO, Sims Ltd

Yet those swings have forced the company to take a hard look at some of its far-flung holdings so it can, as Mikkelsen quips, “recycle” its capital. For example, Sims finally divested itself of part of its municipal recycling business – a large blue-box operation in New York City. In 2022, the firm sold much of its stake to Closed Loop Partners, a New York–based circular economy fund, and then divested the rest last year. “The New York business was, frankly, largely plastic recycling, and that wasn’t our core business,” he says. (New York’s huge blue-box program is now run by Balcones Recycling.)

Along with a few other divestitures as well as the acquisition of new scrap-processing plants in the U.S., Sims has moved to invest in high-tech sorting equipment designed to recover more of the marketable scrap metal in castoffs like end-of-life automobiles. At one of its plants in Nashville, Tennessee, the company has been piloting new automated sorting systems that have been designed to retrieve valuable metals like copper while separating out substances, like plastics, that don’t have any further value. “We’re using technology like optical recognition and robotics to do the last picking of valuable products out of our recycling and waste streams, which maximizes circularity and creates more value for our customers and our business,” Mikkelsen explains. The firm is also using AI-equipped robots to disassemble spent server racks from data centres. “That’s exciting technology for us, because it improves productivity and the accuracy of what we’re doing there.”

Just don’t expect those kinds of investments to generate much in the way of love from the environmental sector or climate-conscious voters. “We’re not doing those types of things which are very obvious to politicians and, I guess, the public in general. But,” Mikkelsen says, “metal recycling is an extraordinarily important part of how we’re going to decarbonize.” 

The post This scrappy Australian recycling pioneer is the most sustainable corporation of 2024 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The prototype was heralded as a victory on the road to breaking our collective addiction to the fossil-fuel-based material, at a moment when hundreds of companies were tripping over themselves pledging to chop their virgin plastic use.

Then Lego confessed it had hit a wall. Last month, the company said its big plan to go all-in on recycled bricks by 2030 would have made Lego Group’s carbon footprint worse when it’s trying to reduce carbon emissions by 37% by 2032.

Tim Brooks, Lego’s head of sustainability, told the Financial Times in September that the recycled plastic was softer and needed more energy to process it. “It’s like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel,” he said. “In order to scale production [of recycled PET, or polyethylene terephthalate], the level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories. After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”

Industry observers are wondering if Lego is tackling its sustainability targets all wrong.

“Many had high hopes that Lego was setting a positive example by actively taking steps for the sustainability of plastics,” says Tiz Mekonnen, with the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Polymer Research. “Sustainability in plastic production extends beyond carbon emissions. Reusing PET plastic waste for products could address pressing waste-management issues while simultaneously reducing reliance on virgin and petrochemical plastics for Lego parts.”

To be sure, emissions from the plastic industry are a massive problem. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says that plastics generated 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – or 3.4% of global emissions – in 2019. By 2060, emissions from the plastics life cycle are on track to more than double.

And plastic-recycling infrastructure has been a hot mess for years. Ever since China banned imports of most plastic waste in 2017, recyclers across North America and Europe have been scrambling for solutions. At this point, just 9% of Canada’s plastic is recycled. That stat isn’t much better in Lego’s home base of Denmark, where most plastics are incinerated.

Like Lego, a lot of private sector players are “hesitant to invest in new facilities and long-term, impactful research, prioritizing short-term profitability for their shareholders instead,” says Mekonnen, who suggests mandating recycled content as one solution.

Other major consumer brands such as Nestlé have said that recycled-content targets have been hampered by “a lack of government recycling infrastructure globally,” as Reuters reported.

Lego might shave emissions down a notch with plans to add solar panels to factories in China, Hungary, Mexico, Vietnam and the United States, where grids are often far from clean. But Lego Group operations only account for 2% of total emissions. The remaining 98% come from their scope 3 emissions – from the production of raw materials, distribution and transportation and the treatment of Lego products when they’re no longer wanted.

Hamish van der Ven is an associate professor of sustainable business management of natural resources at the University of British Columbia. He says Lego is too narrowly focused on addressing production instead of consumption. “Instead of making Lego moderately less carbon intensive, why not focus on reducing the need for new production through innovative sales strategies like renting Lego instead of buying it?”

van der Ven notes that plastic alternatives always come with downsides and additional cost (think paper straws). “Ending fossil fuel subsidies would be a good way to reduce the price difference between plastics and plastic alternatives while funding both infrastructure and research.”

Lego’s sustainability chief has acknowledged that “it’s better to reuse than recycle.” He said the company plans to expand its Lego Replay program, which donates used bricks to children’s non-profits. But Lego, like other companies trying to green themselves, will need to go beyond feel-good pilot programs. “We’re looking at a circular business model — how do we earn revenue from recircling bricks. It’s quite a shift in thinking and ideas,” said Brooks.

Greenpeace Canada’s head of oceans and plastic campaigns, Sarah King, is glad to see Lego talking circular. But, she says, “unless they begin to reduce production overall, their model does not lend itself to circularity . . . A continued reliance on fossil fuels for its products is not compatible with a sustainable or just transition for the business or the wider economy.”

The toymaker has clarified that it’s still “fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032,” adding that the company will “triple spending on sustainability initiatives to $1.4 billion in the four years to 2025.”

Environmental advocates will be watching closely to see whether Lego’s definition of sustainability stacks up.

The post Lego says it hit a recycled plastic stumbling block. Do its claims stack up? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The collection came about after Zara’s parent company Inditex invested in textile recycler Circ. This follows a €100 million (£87 million) deal between Inditex and Finnish textile recycler Infinited Fiber Company for 30% of its recycled output. Zara’s fast fashion rival H&M has also entered a five-year contract with Swedish textile recycler Renewcell to acquire 9,072 tonnes of recycled fibre – equivalent to 50 million T-shirts.

There is a growing appetite among some fashion retailers to turn old clothes into high-quality fibres, and then into new clothes. But even though well-known brands are developing lines using recycled textiles, this movement has not yet reached the scale needed to have a truly global impact.

Before this recent growth in interest in textile recycling, fast fashion’s efforts to tackle throwaway attitudes towards affordable clothing often simply added to the global textile waste mountain – especially in developing countries, say campaigners like Greenpeace.

For example, a skirt deposited at a London chain store under a take-back scheme was reportedly found in a landfill in Bamako, Mali. This is not an isolated incident, it’s a sector-wide problem that sees old clothes being collected but not disposed of properly. An estimated 15 million used clothing items are shipped to Ghana each week from around the world and many end up in the country’s landfills. This is often referred to as waste colonialism.

The fast fashion industry needs greater access to recycled textiles to address this problem. But this means having the means to track “thrown-away” garments to collect those suitable for recycling. The industry also needs facilities that are big enough to turn this waste into new materials for clothing at the scale needed to meet mass market demand.

This is particularly important as these firms prepare for an EU crackdown on the region’s own waste mountain. Following the EU strategy for Sustainable and Circular textiles 2022, the European Commission is drafting new legislation over the next five years to make the fashion industry pay for the cost of processing discarded clothing.

Under the new EU rules, companies will be expected to collect waste equivalent to a certain percentage of their production. While the exact amount has not yet been confirmed yet, European commissioner for the environment Virginijus Sinkevičius has said it will “definitely” be more than 5% of production. Companies may have to pay a fee (reportedly equivalent to €0.12 per T-shirt) towards local authorities’ waste collection work.

But fast fashion brands must ensure that this doesn’t just dump the problem of textile waste into other countries’ landfills. Instead, developing lines out of recycled textiles could give these old clothes a new lease of life.

A Fashion Pact signed by more than 160 brands (a third of the sector by volume) commits companies to ensure that, by 2025, 25% of the raw materials such as textiles that they use have a low impact on the environment – recycled fibre is considered a low-impact material. Some brands have set more ambitious targets, including Adidas, which has committed to using 100% recycled plastics by 2024, and Zara-owner Inditex, which pledged to source 40% of its fibres from recycling processes by 2030.

These impending deadlines, plus the EU legislation, should motivate brands to use more recycled fibres. While the supply of such material is currently limited, an influx of recycling start-ups are finding ways to turn old clothes into new fibres that replicate the look and feel of virgin materials.

Start-ups like Spinnova, Renewcell and Infinited Fibre have developed chemical recycling technologies to create new fibres from cotton-rich clothing. And while cheap low-cost blended materials like poly-cotton are difficult to separate and recycle, firms like Worn Again, Envrnu, and Circ are tackling this problem, too.

Worn Again plans to build a new recycling demo plant in Switzerland, paving the way for 40 licensed plants by 2040, which would be capable of processing 1.8 million tonnes of textile waste per year.

Taking textile recycling from hype to reality

Up to 26% of Europe’s textile waste could be recycled by 2030, according to some estimates, according to a 2022 McKinsey report. This would generate €3.5-€4.5 billion in economic output for the EU, create 15,000 new jobs, and save 3.6 million tonnes of CO². But only 1% of textiles are currently being recycled globally into new clothes – the recycling technology needed for this shift is still in its infancy.

Part of the challenge in scaling up textile recycling to this degree is the lack of information available about what happens to clothes that are thrown away. Sharing data on the volume, locations and compositions of waste generated in the supply chain and collected post-consumption would help evaluate the full potential of textile recycling. Companies like Reverse Resources already provide online databases of information on textile waste – in this case for a global network of 70 recyclers, 44 waste handlers and 1,287 manufacturers in 24 countries.

Increasing textile recycling will require a collaborative approach, as will the development of the technology needed to create high-quality recycled textiles. Brands, investors, suppliers, recyclers, technology providers and local governments must come together to find ways to grow the textile recycling industry. The recent New Cotton Project that involves 12 brands (including H&M group and Adidas), manufacturers, suppliers and research institutes is a first step towards increasing textile recycling.

More money is also needed from all of these groups. To reach the recycling rate of 18%-26% by 2030, it will take billions in infrastructure investment for collecting, sorting and processing textile waste.

Textile recycling is no longer for a few “sustainable” fashion firms – it is quickly becoming a reality that no fast fashion firm can ignore. Shoppers must demand that the brands they love show their commitment to textile recycling beyond marketing campaigns and low-volume fashion collections.

Quynh Do Nhu is assistant professor in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Lancaster University, and Mark Stevenson is a professor of operations management at Lancaster University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The secret to fixing fast fashion’s waste problem appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Accelerate reuse and refill markets

Governments and businesses need to collaborate to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics while developing thriving systems for reusable and refillable products, including deposit-return schemes and new refillable product-delivery models (e.g., modern-day “milkmen” for consumer goods).

Plastic-curbing potential: 30%

Ramp up recycling markets

At least 80% of plastic is landfilled because it costs too much to recycle. Regulators will need to enforce design rules to make plastics more recyclable, and governments should end fossil fuel subsidies for virgin plastic and set mandates for at least 50% recycled content to help level the playing field.

Plastic-curbing potential: 20%

Spur on sustainable alternatives

In cases where reuse isn’t an option, UNEP suggests that corporations carefully replace problematic plastic products with alternative materials, such as recycled paper and certified compostable materials, but only if they’re backed by life-cycle assessments.

Plastic-curbing potential: 17%

Deal with durables

More than 30% of plastic waste comes from “durable plastic” products that last more than three years. To help keep demand for new plastic-based electronics and goods in check (and boost product durability), governments must enable the right to repair and crack down on planned obsolescence.

Stop microplastics at the source

Tiny microplastic particles account for more than 6% of plastic pollution. A ban on intentionally adding microplastics to products is key, but so is redesigning tires, washing machines, polyesters and other textiles so they shed less, preventing microplastic particles from reaching waterways.

Tackle existing plastic pollution

UNEP says that 22% of plastic waste is mismanaged in dump sites, burned in open pits or dumped in the ocean. To help put an end to this, the report calls for a global ban on exporting plastic waste to countries with low collection rates while also building more collection systems in those regions.

The post Knight Bites: 6 ways to win our battle with plastic pollution by 2040 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“In Canada, Amazon’s plastic footprint is disproportionately large, generating an estimated 21.3 million kilograms of plastic waste in 2019 – 1.2 times more than in India, and more than Japan, Brazil, Spain and Mexico combined.”

Oceana Canada is calling on Amazon to offer plastic-free options.

It’s also petitioning the federal government to expand its proposed single-use plastic ban list to include additional problematic plastic items, resins and material types. “The six single-use items identified in the proposed ban list do not significantly contribute to the 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste that is thrown away every year in Canada. As stated by the Minister, the ban covers less than one per cent of Canada’s current plastic use –less than 47,000 metric tonnes.”

Considering Canada’s plastic use is expected to increase by 30% by 2030 and Amazon continues to experience record-breaking sales, environmental advocates want action to be taken immediately.

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