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34 PalletCentral • September-October 2021 palletcentral.com GREEN TRENDS Dr. Brad Gething Recycled vs. Recyclable – What's the Difference? T here is a continuing trend in the business world to tout environmental friendliness or how "green"your product or company is. The pallet industry is no different, and there certainly is no shortage of claims being made by wood pallet competitors. That is a major reason why NWPCA partnered with the USDA Forest Products Lab and why the Pallet Foundation supported the funding for the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for a wood pallet – to put substance behind environmental claims with certifiable, third-party verified calculations of environmental impacts. The development of communication tools like the EPD are a hopeful step in the right direction, however there are other environmental claims being made which may cause confusion in the marketplace. One popular claim is to identify a product as 100% recyclable. This is a useful marketing device because it associates full circularity with recycling, and because recycling is so ubiquitous in our minds, we immediately disregard what that term actually means. When it comes down to it, most things are capable of being 100% recyclable. The real question is, how much is truly recycled? To answer that question a few industry conditions require exploration: (1) Is there an infrastructure in place to collect the product after use? (2) How difficult is it to turn it into something usable? (3) Is it economically sustainable to continue recycling (is there a market)? If all three of these questions are not easily answered, then the likelihood of the product being recycled is less, unless an outside force like the government intervenes to subsidize the effort. Wood pallets are proving to be a environmentally superior product thanks to being highly recycled. A good example of this is the recycling of plastic water bottles. In general, plastic water bottles are recognized as highly recyclable, but the EPA estimates that only 29% of plastic bottles are recycled 1 . How could this be? There is a high level of familiarity with the practice of recycling, whether at home or in public. Society continues to trend in a favorable direction when it comes to the recycling of plastic bottles, with environmental consciousness becoming more mainstream, but there are still many municipalities that do not offer curbside recycling and there isn't a recycling bin next to every trash can you see. The use of plastics as a combustible fuel for energy production is another option for using recycled plastic, but with limited benefits (there is no fossil fuel offset), the practice is not widespread. The process of re-melting and molding a new plastic bottle from recycled plastic is relatively straightforward, but it is highly susceptible to contaminations, whether they be foreign substances or other plastics. Once the plastic bottles are collected, they must be separated from other plastics and thoroughly washed, adding equipment and time that ultimately increase costs. Finally, the market for recycled plastic bottles has grown over time but is still much smaller in comparison to the virgin market. Estimates show the recycled market in the U.S. is a small fraction compared to the virgin market. The recycled market is estimated in the $10s of millions 2 , while the virgin market is approximately $12 billion 3 . It is difficult to get recycled resins to perform as consistently as virgin ones, so they are often mixed at a much lower percentage (5-10%) to mitigate quality control issues. Instead, recycled resins are processed into certain applications that require lower performance, such as textiles.

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