Plastic is everywhere. It wraps our food, it sheaths bunches of flowers, it contains liquids, and it holds shopping. Plastic does a great job of protecting consumables from damage, but once that job is done, plastic can become a problem. Much of it will end up blowing through the environment, becoming part of the food chain, and eventually collecting in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Many people blame the big multinational companies that rely on plastic to package their products. Last year, for instance, US-based behemoth Procter & Gamble produced approximately 1.5 billion pounds of plastic packaging. But part of the solution to the plastics problem could start with these firms, too.

In response to the threat to the environment, as well as its public image, in 2018 P&G set a series of sustainability goals. Among them, it pledged, by 2030, to reduce the use of virgin petroleum plastic in its packaging by 50 percent, which it estimates will avoid the use of more than 300,000 tons (600 million pounds) of virgin plastic in total.

Jack McAneny, P&G’s director of Global Sustainability, looks after this project. We asked McAneny about how the company plans to reduce its plastic footprint, and how that will require reaching up and down its supply chain, inventing new technology, and even getting involved with municipal curbside recycling.

Why not abandon plastics altogether: What is their advantage as packaging materials?

McAneny: They are a valuable material in terms of lightweight packaging and product protection. Reducing the weight of packaging reduces transportation footprint. Plastics require less fuel to transport than glass and other materials. The issue is, plastics should not be polluting our waterways or littering our lands.

What is the greatest obstacle to reusing more plastics?

Quality. The need for quality has led us to think about how we can help the industry innovate in different sorting and recovery technologies that will help increase the supply of recycled resin.

To that end, P&G scientists have developed technology to purify polypropylene, the thicker, more robust plastic used in a lot of the caps and closures on bottles, in yogurt containers, and in other sorts of tubs common in grocery stores. There are barriers to the reuse of polypropylene; collected materials are often dark, which ends up an unappealing color when recycled, and it can also retain an unpleasant odor, both of which limit the options for reuse. Our scientists have developed a process that basically returns polypropylene to a virgin-like state. This will transform polypropylene recycling and greatly increase the ability to reuse these materials. We have licensed the technology, commercialized under the name ‘Pure Cycle.’ Polypropylene is first melted down and then the dyes, odors and other contaminants are filtered out, yielding a clear material that performs like virgin plastic.

What are the biggest challenges to increasing the use of recycled plastics?

In the U.S. the biggest challenge is the inconsistency in how local recycling programs are set up and the resulting confusion among customers as to what’s recyclable and what’s not. If we can drive consistency in what is collected, it will help unlock new supplies and materials. It’s going to require us working with our peers in industry, NGOs and other groups. Government policies can also help establish standard collection protocols.

What are some plastics that are currently not recycled that might lend themselves to new technologies?

One of the issues we have worked on is how we can enable curbside collection of flexible films, which are used to package many items, including cheese, paper towels, dry-cleaning, and diapers. Flexible films are very lightweight and provide a high level of protection for products, but are a contaminant in recycling. Most municipalities don't want films in the curbside collection bin because they jam up the equipment in the materials recovery facility.

We are launching a pilot in Pennsylvania, in collaboration with other industry partners, that will target up to 200,000 households. We’ve worked with a local materials recovery facility to retrofit some of their existing equipment with new technologies we have developed that allow them to separate out the films and recover them. This will allow consumers to place flexible films into their curbside bin, have that sorted and recovered and separated, and therefore unlock a new source of valuable material. The effort is being overseen by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a nonprofit alliance of nearly 30 member companies, chaired by P&G CEO David Taylor, that has committed more than $1 billion to end plastic waste, and has made infrastructure development one its key goals.

Part of your overarching plan is to “inspire” consumers. How do you plan to do that?

Inspiration can take the form of us increasing use of the ‘how to recycle’ label—that helps to educate consumers in terms of what can and cannot be recycled. The ‘beach plastic bottle’ initiative, pioneered by our Head & Shoulders shampoo brand, uses recovered materials from beach and river cleanups. They have worked with a number of partners to create a supply chain of recycled plastic that originated from beach and river waste. The current bottles we have in stores are white, and the Head & Shoulders bottles generated from the beach plastic were distinctively gray. When we launched these in the EU, we tried to educate consumers to draw attention to the issue of beach plastic, but also to reinforce the importance of recyclability. I think that's a great example of how we are seeking not only to find valuable solutions for recovered beach plastic, but also ways to engage with our consumers on the topic.