Using Recyclable Materials Does Not Necessarily Lead to Recyclable Products: A Statistical Entropy-Based Recyclability Assessment of Deli Packaging

The increasing attention to reduce plastic waste drives the design of products containing fewer plastics. Deli packaging is such a product, ranging from solely plastic packaging to relatively new paperboard-plastic composites. In this research, the main objective is to quantify the recyclability of different deli packaging types and evaluate the effectiveness of recycling instructions. Therefore, we combine statistical entropy calculations (for the compositional complexity) with energy calculations from generic sorting and separation processes (i.e., the energy required to separate the products into their chemical substances). Deli packaging samples have been collected, categorized, weighed, and dismantled. The results indicate that the use of paperboard may be slightly better than using solely plastics when one evaluates on a product-level basis. However, since the product types are likely to disturb each other’s waste streams, the analysis should be extended to the whole waste stream in order to fully gauge their impact. Recycling instructions for consumers were found to, in some cases, increase the complexity of monostreams (i.e., plastic and paperboard fractions after dismantling). Although this is evident, for the first time, we develop and apply simple quantitative metrics to describe innate recyclability. The methodology allows one to support design-for-recycling decisions for more complicated systems.