Historically, the Blue Box curbside recycling system has been the predominant means of recovering
recyclables from residents, offering the opportunity to recycle a variety of materials. With the growth in
types of packaging and popularity of the Blue Box recycling system, program operators have gradually
added more types of consumer packaging while simultaneously moving towards increased commingling
of recyclables during collection. Given the changing mix of packaging and collection systems, there is a
need to understand, the implications of film packaging trends on system costs, and identify
opportunities for improved efficiency in the current curbside systems. To this end, the Canadian Plastics
Industry Association (CPIA), Continuous Improvement Fund, and Stewardship Ontario jointly sponsored
this project to explore the opportunities and costs of diverting flexible film packaging and the
opportunities and challenges this class of plastics provides for material processing facilities and
downstream plastic reprocessors to sort and classify the flexible film stream for maximum utilization.
As well, this team had the volunteer support of the Pac Next organization that assisted with the project
by providing advice and liaison coordination from its industry membership.
Flexible film plastics are a large component of both the consumer‐packaging and industrial, commercial,
and institutional discard streams. Flexible packaging is composed primarily of polyethylene (PE) based
plastics, as well as a variety of other resins and laminated film plastics that can be more complex
depending on the packaging application (i.e., can be composed of multiple layers of PE and non‐PE
elements). Currently, only PE based plastic film packaging is commonly recycled.
In Ontario PE film plastic bags and overwraps have typically been collected from residents through
municipal curbside and municipal depot systems. Over the past few years, many large retailer chains
have initiated and expanded return‐to‐retail collection programs for plastic carryout bags. Curbside and
return center approaches each have strengths and weaknesses, and participation rates, recovery rates,
and costs and revenue vary considerably among them. This study endeavors to objectively compare the
various approaches of film diversion and processing to provide information for use in discussions
regarding the future of film recycling in Ontario, and potentially more broadly in the rest of Canada.
This report:
Discusses the amounts of various types of flexible film packaging generated in Ontario, identifies
trends, and makes future quantity projections;
Provides a comprehensive summary of recycling markets for recovered flexible film packaging to
understand better what markets are currently available and what film types are currently
recyclable by today’s market standards and the issues in recycling flexible films at material
recovery facilities and at plastics reprocessors;
Provides a comprehensive summary of recovery markets that films can be directed to for
conversion into energy or chemicals;
Identifies available commercial and pre‐commercial technologies for sorting a variety of film
grades either at a materials recovery facility (MRF) or at a reprocessing operation; and
Identifies various collection and processing methodologies, the pros and cons and cost drivers of
each, and compares the associated capital and operating costs implications to collect film at