True recycling

Jason Galley, executive director of the Metal Packaging Manufacturers Association (MPMA) says that Europe has missed a real opportunity to have a stronger definition of quality recycling that encourages materials that can withstand multiple recycling cycles without any change in their primary properties, stimulates design for recycling and further encourages effective and efficient recycling. This is the case for metal packaging.

Galley adds that by the end of 2023 the first definition of ‘high quality recycling’ was presented by ENVI – the European Parliament’s Environment Committee on the PPWR (Packaging Waste Regulation).

As expected – he assures us – the attempted definition was received positively by the trade bodies representing most materials, but always with a warning that it did not really do justice to their material, or that it favored one material over another. Metal packaging was no exception in this regard.

Metal Packaging Europe (MPE) showed its support for the introduction of the high quality recycling concept, but highlighted the inherent weakness in this new classification: its absolute failure to differentiate between the different recycling cycles.

How can products and materials that can be recycled only once, in what is in turn a non-recyclable, purely linear process, be classified in the same category as those that can be recycled a few more times, and these, in turn, with products and materials that are completely circular and can be recycled again and again and ‘permanently available’ such as metal?
This, of course, is essentially what we have been saying for years: metal can be recycled again and again without loss of quality and has an unrivaled recycling infrastructure built up over many decades. This is summed up in our industry slogan: ‘Metal recycles forever’.

Jason Galley proposes in his article to introduce the idea of ‘true recycling’ by differentiating between materials that can be recycled over and over again, such as metal, creating a truly circular recycling process, and linear materials that can only be recycled once, or materials that can be recycled a limited number of times.

Galley adds that “Definitions are rarely perfect, especially first drafts. And from a metal perspective, a genuine recognition that there is a classification of recycling quality is a good thing. We know that metal recycling has been and always will be at the top, a position verified by its status as a permanently available material – enshrined in its British Standard 8905 status.”