"Improving the quality of recycled PET is really difficult. Incremental improvement is not linear. It's more difficult with every increasing pound of recycled PET to meet recycled content. It's kind of an exponential scale of difficulty," he said. While increased demand for recycled PET has led to a decoupling of prices from virgin PET, Delnik said, market forces are still at play. "Demand is real and positive. But, clearly, this is not something that we can guarantee going forward," he said. "We do have a decoupling from virgin prices. We do have an acceptance of the premium that companies have, but those are not unlimited," he said. As the gap between recycled and virgin resin prices increases, despite the pledges, "the appetite from companies using recycled content goes down," Delnik said. A key to all of this, he said, is establishing a value for the used PET bottle. PET's recycling rate of about 29 percent in the United States, he said, is kind of a meaningless number to gage the market. States with bottle deposits have recycling rates in the 70, 80, 90 percent range, he said. States without deposits don't come close , he said. "The average collection rate is just under 30 percent. I would argue that number is absolutely meaningless. That number represents nothing. There's no state in the nation that has collection rate anywhere close to that number on either side," Delnik said. "What we need to realize is that unless we establish value to the bottle, unless the bottle has a value at any point of its useful life, we are not going to get collection rates — very simple," he said. Delnik previously operated PET recycler Verdeco Recycling in Terre Haute, Ind., a few hours from one of the most talked about rivalries in college football: Michigan vs. Ohio State. In his view, tailgating at both teams' stadiums serve as a microcosm for PET bottle recycling. PET bottles quickly disappear from Michigan's parking lots thanks to that state's deposit bill. Enterprising students can make some quick cash by collecting the discards of others. But Ohio State's lots are trashed with bottle debris due to a lack of bottle deposits there. "Everybody talks about it. I don't think anybody here disagrees that we need to increase collection. But I don't think that we fully understand that we can talk about it as much as we want to until the cows come home," Delnik said. "But unless we do something that works, nothing is going to change." "[The] recycled PET industry, from our point of view, is really at an important crossroads. And I think that what we need to do, we need to basically be intellectually honest and realize what's working [and] what's not. Learn from our mistakes in the past and move forward," Delnik said. "That includes really increasing collection rates through deposit return systems or reverse vending machines. Anything that assigns value to the bottle. We need to build recycle mandates" Source: JIM JOHNSON Staff Writer, Plastics News Staff
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