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Your Packaging Is the Problem | Yale Insights

Unfortunately, the world still sucks at recycling.

Q: Is there a key hurdle to doing more effective recycling?

There are so many hurdles it’s hard to even know where to begin. But to be clear, it’s not that we don’t have the technological ability: it’s that the incentives, policy, and infrastructure to collect and process plastics are all broken. This is not to say recycling is unfixable; far from it—but there are many levers of change we need to pull to make recycling work.

In terms of incentives, making new virgin plastic is very cheap, artificially cheap, both because of subsidies to fossil fuel companies and because we don’t take into account the environmental externalities that come from the plastic going into landfills, incinerators, and the environment. We need to change the incentives for the fossil fuel companies and for the companies using plastics. Right now, the producer of a package, both the manufacturer of the package as well as the brand that packages their product in it, are not responsible for the end-of-life of that package once the consumer is done with it. That’s a huge externality.

Q: How do we change that?

For several decades there’s been discussion of a policy approach called extended producer responsibility (EPR). With EPR, the producer must take financial and/or operational responsibility for the end-of-life of the product; in this example, the product in question is packaging.

In practice, producers pay fees based on the amount of packaging that they sell into a given economy that has an EPR law. The fees fund the proper end-of-life management of packaging through effective collection and recycling systems. It can also mean environmental mitigation to keep packaging out of ecosystems.

An intelligent EPR law includes what we call eco-modulated fees. That is, fees are lower for easy-to-recycle materials and higher for difficult-to-recycle materials. The aim is to create upstream incentives for companies to use recyclable packaging.

EPR laws represent a pretty radical shift in who the financial and operational burden of dealing with packaging waste falls on. They say, “Hey, Proctor & Gamble. Hey, Unilever. Hey, Coke and Pepsi, your responsibility for this bottle or container doesn’t end once you sell it to a consumer. You have to deal with it once it’s disposed of, or at least pay fees to ensure it’s responsibly disposed of.”

Four states have passed packaging EPR laws in the last two years: Maine, Oregon, Colorado, and California. California is a big deal because it’s the fifth-largest—perhaps now the fourth-largest—economy in the world. Companies wanting to sell goods into that market must use packaging that is recyclable or compostable by 2032. This is going to cause massive shifts in the market for packaging.