Page 39 - Plastics News Issue - January 2025

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

itself, without investing capital. retti, adding that he didn’t want to leave behind
any value in a bale. “So my goal is to, unfortu-
Nevertheless, Jacobsen pointed out that not nately, hurt the secondary sorter.
every residual stream is suitable for second-
ary sorting. “You really need to do your home- “I don’t want to give up one PET bottle,” he said.
work on them first and kind of look at patterns “I don’t want to give up one HDPE bottle. My
and what is your kind of average over time that job is to extract as much value on one pass of
you’re going to recover, and certainly make sure that material coming in that front door where it is
that there are markets available on where to no more than landfill. Landfill costs are massive. I
sell some of this stuff,” she said. Due to regional want to reduce that.”
differences in material streams, she continued,
“you have to pick where you’re going to be very In addition, brand owners face mandates for re-
carefully as well.” cycled content in packaging or have made what
may be “unrealistic” public announcements sur-
Lovewell added that “it’s very hard to justify rounding PCR targets in packaging, McDonald
these secondary sorting facilities unless there said. “So they’ll basically take any amount of net
are markets for those materials, unless you have new tons they can get their hands on, mean-
enough material to justify building a plant that ing they’ll almost finance a full facility for us just
can handle that. And all that requires being in the to guarantee themselves the offtake,” such as
vicinity of where this operation is going.” clear PET.

Extracting value remains paramount Because the MRF’s goal is to derive maximum
value from bales, said Jacobsen, “if you’re any-
Ultimately the panelists agreed that the prima- body in the secondary sorting space, you have
ry goal of secondary sorting was to reduce the to look beyond the MRF.”
tonnage headed for landfills, and to extract as
much value as possible from consumer material Source – Plastics Recycling Updates
streams.

At the MRF level, “we keep on mining and strip-
ping that value out of that waste bill,” said Fer-

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January 2025 PLASTICS NEWS 39