At Loopipak, our mission is to drastically reduce single-use packaging, whether it's made of cardboard or plastic. But to understand why we chose to focus on reuse, it's essential to take a closer look at a pressing issue: plastic recycling. Where do we really stand ? What can actually be recycled ? And most importantly, what are the limitations of this system that struggles to meet the urgency of today's environmental crisis ?
What Plastics Are Actually Recycled?
Not all plastics are created equal. In theory, nearly all of them can be recycled. In practice, only certain types are actually recycled. The most commonly recycled plastics are so-called thermoplastics, such as PET (used in bottles) and HDPE (used in opaque containers). Plastics that are mixed with other materials—like aluminum or textile fibers—are very difficult, if not impossible, to recycle today.
What is the Plastic Recycling Rate?
Despite awareness campaigns and industrial efforts, the actual recycling rate for plastic remains low. Globally, less than 20% of plastic waste is effectively recycled. And when it comes to reintegrating plastic into products of the same quality (closed-loop recycling), that number drops even further. The rest is either incinerated, landfilled, or exported—often to countries that are less equipped to handle such waste, raising serious ethical and environmental concerns.
The Challenges of Plastic Recycling
Plastic recycling faces several obstacles:
- The diversity of plastics: more than 7 major families, each with very different properties.
- Contamination: plastic that is soiled by food residues or other materials is much harder to recycle.
- Sorting: Too many mistakes are still made during sorting, and high-performance infrastructure is often lacking.
- Loss of quality : with each cycle, plastic loses performance. This is often referred as downcycling.
Mechanical vs Chemical Recycling: What's the Difference?
Mechanical recycling is the most widespread method. It involves shredding, washing and and then remelting plastic to create new objects. But this process has its limits: It only works with plastics that are well sorted, uncontaminated and of the same type.
In most cases, unsorted or non-recyclable plastic is either incinerated (with energy recovery) or landfilled. This is a reality that the industry struggle to improve.
Faced with these limitations, chemical recycling is emerging as a complementary and promising alternative. Rather than melting plastic, this process breaks it down at the molecular level to recover its basic components (monomers or other substances), which can then be used to produce new plastic of identical quality as virgin plastic.
Several chemical recycling techniques are currently being developed.
- Pyrolysis, for example, heats plastics in the absence of oxygen to transform them into pyrolysis oil, which can then be refined and reused in the production of new polymers.
- Gasification converts plastic waste into syngas, which can be used to generate energy or serve as a feedstock for chemical production.
- Depolymerization breaks down polymer chains to recover the original monomers—a particularly promising solution for PET and polystyrene.
- Solvolysis uses specific solvents to selectively dissolve and purify plastics.
Chemical recycling offers several advantages: it makes it possible to recycle plastics that are currently considered non-recyclable, and to obtain materials with a quality equivalent to that of virgin plastic. However, it is still not widely used, as it requires significant investment, consumes a large amount of energy, and presents both technical and economic challenges.
But let’s be clear: this technology is still emerging, energy-intensive, and its overall environmental impact has yet to be fully assessed. It does not address the overproduction of plastic—it simply makes it appear more acceptable.
Reuse: a Concrete Response to the Limits of Recycling?
At Loopipak, we have chosen a different path: avoiding waste production from the outset by promoting reusable, repairable, durable, and traceable packaging. We believe reuse is the best way to break free from our dependence on single-use plastic and to significantly reduce the real environmental impact of our activities. Our reusable packaging is designed to last, repaired when damaged, and produced from upcycled advertising waste turned into valuable resources. It’s our way of reversing the linear, throwaway logic.
Plastic Recycling