Thank you, Carol.
Thank you to the committee for inviting us here today.
First of all, our industry is deeply committed to the four Rs approach: reduce, reuse, recycle and recovery. This is called the sustainable material management approach developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or OECD. Many of you are familiar with this. It deals with all externalities of packaging and material use over the entire life cycle of packaging and products. It certainly can be complementary to the circular economy approach. Without it, our chances of getting to zero waste—not just for plastics, but all waste—will be harder to achieve. We certainly would like you to investigate that and we will be supplying materials in that regard.
The next slide is self-explanatory so I will skip over it to the next one. How will we get to our 100% diversion and zero plastic waste to landfills goals? We believe we have to increase our recycling and recovery and deal with the infrastructure to get to 100%.
The next slide is interesting because Trucost advised the United Nations Environment Programme originally on marine waste, but they did look at plastic sustainability as a follow-up to that research and found out that plastics actually are 3.8 times less than the alternatives to plastic packaging. The conclusion was that we need to manage plastics better to maintain our sustainable development goals. How will we do that? Right now we are not capturing enough plastics.
This slide essentially indicates that even if we triple our recycling we will not manage 40% to 50% of the plastics. I might add that the municipalities and academic organizations I deal with say the same thing. We need to manage the other 50% . Even within the circular economy approach we need to examine the gaps that are there. That's why we brought up sustainable material management.
We need the new recovery options.
On this slide you will see there are many diverse yields from plastic recycling and recovery, and many options on the energy or chemical side.
This slide talks about the infrastructure. We really need to improve our infrastructure on collection and processing end markets, even government procurement programs, for recycled content. This slide refers to the energy bag that will collect plastics that are not in the blue box at curbside recycling.
Again, on infrastructure, we put millions of dollars into a project that just launched on February 22. It will collect flexibles, including pouches that you see, and develop the market.