Please share some background on yourself and your company

My name is Zach Muscato. I lead sustainability efforts for Plastic Ingenuity. With seven strategic locations, Plastic Ingenuity is one of the largest custom thermoformers in North America. Its experience, global reach, and genuine dedication to customers allow the company to bring clients’ packaging visions to life, scale the product, and create partnerships that last beyond the product’s lifecycle.

Specializing in food, healthcare, and consumer goods packaging, Plastic Ingenuity offers a range of services to support customers' sustainability and circularity goals, including sustainable packaging assessments, sustainability roadmaps, recyclability consulting, life-cycle assessments, and take-back programs.

How does rigid plastic packaging fit into a circular packaging economy and how does it compare to other materials such as metal and glass?

Rigid plastic packaging, like thermoforms, plays a critical role in the circular packaging economy. Thermoforms have immense utility across a variety of applications. They touch our lives daily, from preserving the food we serve our families to protecting the medical devices we trust to save lives. Given their lightweight nature and relatively low energy requirements to produce and transport, plastic packaging has lower greenhouse gas emissions per package than alternatives like metal and glass. When you factor in preservation attributes, such as extending the useful life of perishable foods, thermoformed packaging offers significant benefits to society. However, we must improve end-of-life outcomes for all packaging formats, including thermoforms, to advance circularity. We need solutions that keep thermoforms circulating in our economy so we can continue to reap their benefits.

More and more brands are looking for packaging that has been designed for recycling. Do these new, more sustainable designs change the way your produce your products and, if so, what adjustments need to be made?

Design for recycling is ingrained in our design and development process. Our design engineers are fluent in the Association of Plastic Recyclers' design guidelines. Every design we create undergoes a sustainability assessment, including design for recycling, by one of our sustainability experts before it is presented to a customer for consideration. By embedding sustainability into the design aspect of our products, we can implement sustainable solutions consistent with brand owners' goals for circularity. We have made considerable investments in equipment to utilize a higher level of post-consumer recycled (PCR) material in our products. Due to these investments, we can offer PCR at levels of up to 100% to brands seeking to increase the recycled content of their packaging portfolios.

What considerations need to be made when assessing the recyclability of plastic packaging?

We adhere to the principles outlined in the APR design guidelines. The most common aspects we encounter as thermoformers when designing for recycling are material selection and overall size. We select materials that recyclers desire whenever possible, such as PET, PP, and HDPE. Over the last several years, we have helped many brands transition from challenging-to-recycle materials like OPS and PVC to PET. We have leveraged the APR Critical Guidance Recognition protocol to validate the recycling compatibility of barrier trays used for extended shelf life.

Recyclers of rigid trays prefer formats that are more three-dimensional than two-dimensional so that they can sort properly at a Material Recovery Facility. This poses a challenge for thermoformers since many of our trays are shallow. We do not advise brands to increase the size of their packaging, which would increase material usage and harm pack-out density, in order to meet design for recycling preferences. Therefore, we often must balance competing needs from a sustainability perspective.

Are there any recent innovations in thermoforming technology that have the ability to improve output volume, energy efficiency, or quality, or reduce waste?

Many recent innovations in thermoforming technology excite me due to their potential to contribute to a more sustainable future for rigid plastics. Material advancements give me the most optimism about the future. Our industry is developing new materials that provide all the benefits of conventional plastics but with enhanced sustainability. I’m particularly excited about the potential of using bio-based renewable feedstock to produce conventional polymers like PET, PP, and HDPE. These technologies will enable our industry to leverage an alternative to fossil fuel-derived plastics while tapping into existing recycling markets for those valuable plastic types.

I firmly believe our industry needs to embrace technology that enables plastics to transition to lower-carbon, renewable resources if we are going to compete with alternatives like fiber-based packaging in the minds of consumers and brands. We also need to reach a point where consumers can recycle plastic packaging as commonly and easily as they do with their used boxes and papers.

Zach Muscato will be speaking on Day 2 at the Plastics Recycling World Expo Theater.