This time, the C.A.P. Pack sits down with Tamsin Ettefagh, Chief Sustainability Officer and VP of Industry at PureCycle, to talk about advanced recycling, polypropylene, and what it will take to build a more practical circular system.
Watch the full episode above or listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or our website. Want a sneak peek? Read on for a few of the biggest moments from the conversation.
We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to speak with Tamsin Ettefagh, who is the Chief Sustainability Officer and VP of Industry at PureCycle. She brings decades of experience in plastics recycling and a deep understanding of how recycling systems, packaging design, and end markets all need to work together.
This topic needs more than surface-level talk. Tamsin brought both the technical view and the real-world view, which made for a very honest conversation about where recycling works, where it falls short, and what still needs to change.
For us, one of the most interesting parts of the conversation came when Tamsin shared how she got into the recycling world in the first place.
Her career did not start in plastics engineering, but with a volunteer recycling program. When a rejected load of plastic forced her to see just how messy the system really was, the frustration led her to do something about it, ultimately shaping her career the way she thinks about plastics now.
As she put it, she went from “really kind of despising a material” to understanding “the value that plastics bring on sustainability and society.”
Plastic can create waste. Plastic can also protect food, cut damage, and make modern packaging possible. Both are true. The work is in building systems that keep the value and cut the waste.
The term “advanced recycling” gets thrown around so often that it can start to mean everything and nothing at once.
Tamsin broke it down in plain language. PureCycle’s process does not break polypropylene down to its base building blocks. It dissolves the material, removes the things that do not belong there, and brings back a cleaner polypropylene resin.
In her words, “We’re basically washing out the contaminants by dissolving the polypropylene.” She breaks it down with what she calls the “salt analogy.” Simply put, if you had salt, pepper, and sand mixed together, and you wanted to reclaim the salt and get rid of the rest, what would you do? A solvent — in this case, water — can solve your problem. Place the mixture in water and watch what happens:
Pepper floats and can be skimmed off
Sand sinks and can be sifted out
Salt, the material you want to reclaim, dissolves in the water. Let the water evaporate and you’re left with salt.
We’re not working with salt, pepper, and sand. We’re working with polypropylene, but the analogy helps explain how advanced recycling processes separate contaminants from polypropylene to recover a cleaner material.
Polypropylene (PP) has a lot going for it. It can be rigid or flexible, clear or pigmented. It can run in a wide range of packaging formats and be built for a wide range of needs.
That range is one reason so many people rely on it, but it’s also one reason recycling polypropylene gets messy. A material that works across many uses will show up in many forms, and when the material doesn’t have critical mass in one format and one color, it becomes much more difficult to sort, recover, and scale.
Natalie mused, “As a packaging material producer, part of what we love about polypropylene is the fact that it's so versatile. You have your choice of different resins, all these different properties. You can add a barrier to it. You can add color to it. This, that, and the other thing. Sounds like that's actually what is the material's downfall on the other end when it comes to recyclability. You need to have enough of that one material to make it an economically viable business to actually recycle it, then you also need the infrastructure.”
Polypropylene is useful because it is flexible. Recycling systems struggle for the same reason.
Jonathan asks a key question on the future of PP: if polypropylene recycling is going to grow, what kind of package helps get us there?
Tamsin’s answer? Thermoforming.
More specifically, she pointed to dairy and refrigerated packaging as a strong chance to create the volume and consistency recycling systems need. “We love thermoform,” she said, “If I was queen of the packaging decision, I would love, love, love to see everything in the dairy aisle be all made out of a thermoformed polypropylene instead of 5 or 6 different materials today. Because then we could educate the consumer easier: if it’s in the dairy aisle, it’s recyclable.”
The more a material shows up in a format that can be recognized, sorted, collected, and reused, the better chance it has of staying in the system.
For us, that part of the conversation hit close to home. We spend a lot of time talking about what a package needs to do on the line and on the shelf. But what happens after use matters too. If material choice can support both performance and recovery, that is a better long-term answer.
There is no shortage of recycled content goals right now. Brands are making commitments at the same time that states are passing laws and teams are being asked to add PCR into packaging — goals are moving fast.
But a goal is not a supply chain.
You still need feedstock, collection, sorting, and processing that can deliver material clean enough and stable enough for the job. And in food packaging, the bar is even higher.
Mechanical recycling is still part of the mix. Better package design is part of it too. So is better infrastructure. And advanced recycling can play a role, especially when polypropylene needs to come back cleaner and more consistent than traditional streams can manage.
Thanks for tuning in to the latest episode of Crazy About Packaging. We had a great time talking with Tamsin Ettefagh, and we hope this episode gave you a clearer view of where advanced recycling fits and where polypropylene still has room to grow.
If you’re looking to connect with Tamsin, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn, send her an email at tettefagh@purecycle.com, or reach her cell phone at (336) 451-4767. She’s not shy when it comes to talking about recycling!
Thanks for getting a little crazy about packaging with us! Be sure to subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or catch past episodes on our website. And if you’re working through a packaging change, looking at recycled content, or trying to sort out what makes sense for your application, reach out to ICPG. We’d love to talk.