Squaring The Circle
Plastics Suppliers Between Sustainability And Customer Pressure
What Are The Difficulties In Using Recycled Materials, Especially For SMEs?
Many plastics processing companies are in a bit of a tight spot. On the one hand, they face increasing demand from their customers for the use of recycled material. On the other hand, they have to meet these customers’ unchanged high demands when it comes to the technical properties of their products.
“This is like squaring the circle and often almost impossible to achieve,” says Berit Bartram.
She works as the coordinator of the non-profit Knowledge and Innovation Network for Polymer Technology (WIP — Wissens- und Innovationsnetzwerks Polymertechnik), where companies and academic institutions along the entire value chain of the plastics industry have joined forces.
Especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) could find themselves in this “sandwich”, as Berit Bartram puts it. SMEs are typical among plastics processors that, while being active as suppliers, do not offer their products to end consumers themselves. She experiences the dilemma almost daily in conversations with WIP member companies.
Many users of plastic products, and that includes parts of the automotive industry, have so far hardly adapted their requirement catalogues for the products they supply to the changed conditions of more sustainable production that is demanded everywhere.
The sometimes extreme requirements in terms of, for example, shape, dimensional stability or smell properties stay the same, while the proportion of recycled materials in the products should increase. However, recycled plastics do not behave as predictably as the original material during processing. The plastics processing company as a supplier must therefore create an unchanged product using a different material input.
According to Berit Bartram, this challenge is exacerbated by the often insufficient documentation of the technical properties of recycled materials. With newly produced plastic granulates, also known as the virgin material, the chemical industry provides comprehensive safety data sheets. The material properties for dimensioning, processing and application are well-known and communicated. For recycled materials, however, such information is usually not available as reliably and completely. This deficit can often only be avoided by the recyclers at great expense — if only because the properties of recycled plastics change with the input flow at the recycling plants, whereas virgin material always consists only of more or less the same basic materials.
„Our medium-sized companies in particular do not usually have the means to check the incoming material themselves in this respect,“ says Berit Bartram.
The result of this dilemma: When in doubt, the plastics processor does not go for the recycled plastics but rather for the virgin material — simply to be on the safe side. Berit Bartram in her role as representative of a cross-sector network demands:
“We need to have a debate now on the extent to which the applying industry can increase its tolerances when buying intermediate products, without noticeable losses in quality for the end consumer.”
The prerequisite for this is that the product designers for the applying industry talk more intensively to the plastics processors about a balance between product properties and sustainability than they used to. They should also be prepared to make compromises. “For example, if the board of a car manufacturer decides that from now on 30 per cent of its vehicle parts should be made of recyclable material, then in future it will no longer be enough to simply pass this requirement on to the suppliers,” says the WIP coordinator.
Speaking Of Price
Apparently, the next problem for suppliers of plastic products is the price. As intermediate product manufacturers who themselves have no contact to the end consumer, plastics processors are usually unable to compensate for the more expensive use of recycled materials by demanding higher prices. This is because they lack the opportunity to position their products with the consumers as particularly sustainable and thus higher priced. “Margins are already approaching zero,” Berit Bartram reports.
Incidentally, she also does not believe that minimum recycled material quotas introduced by law will help the industry out of the dilemma described here:
“General quotas are not an effective means because they hardly take into account the product-specific conditions. It would be helpful to support the recycling companies to avoid the high costs that are caused by complex testing and documentation of the material properties. This would at least partially offset the cost disadvantage of recycled plastics compared to virgin materials and at the same time make it easier for our processing companies to use recycled plastics. The data obtained could then also be useful for product designers as part of simulation processes.”
However, such a proposal is currently not on the political agenda.
Stronger Cross-Industry Cooperation
The most important step remains a stronger cross-industry cooperation in the development of sustainable solutions using plastics. The members of the Knowledge and Innovation Network for Polymer Technology also see this as a task for them.
“We have to find a new, common language,” Berit Bartram believes. “Everyone keeps talking about the value chain. What we really need are circles of value creation.”
This article has originally been published in the below linked report.
