Why Isn't Food Packaging Zero Waste?
Aluminum and PET have real recycling pathways. Most other food packaging doesn't.
Over 82 million tons of containers and packaging waste end up in US landfills every year — packaging is one of the largest categories in the municipal waste stream. In California alone, 8.5 million tons of single-use packaging and food ware went to landfill in 2024. Between 2015 and 2024, an estimated 1.5 trillion beverage containers were wasted in the US — 785 billion PET bottles, 553 billion metal cans, 220 billion glass bottles. Americans wasted 504 beverage containers per person in 2024.
A few food-packaging materials have working recovery pathways and most don’t. This briefing goes through them one by one.
Aluminum cans — the closest thing to a success story, and still not closed loop
Aluminum cans are the most recycled beverage container in the United States. Aluminum can be recycled indefinitely without losing properties. Recycling a can uses 95% less energy than making one from virgin material. The industry has set targets of 70% recycling rate by 2030 and 90% by 2050.
The problem is collection. The 10 US states with deposit-return systems represent only 27% of the population but account for 51% of all aluminum cans recycled. The aluminum can recycling rate in deposit states averages 68% versus 22% in non-deposit states. The Container Recycling Institute calculated that implementing a national deposit-return system would raise the recycling rate to 85% and recover hundreds of thousands of additional tons of aluminum annually. Forty states haven’t adopted one.
PET bottles — a real recycling pathway that captures a fraction of what’s produced
PET (polyethylene terephthalate) is the one plastic with a real bottle-to-bottle recycling pathway. It can be cleaned, shredded, melted, and reformed into new food-grade bottles. Deposit-return states recycle 61% of all PET bottles in the country despite having only 27% of the population.
Outside deposit states, PET bottle recycling rates drop sharply. Curbside programs capture PET but at lower rates, and contamination from food residue, caps, labels, and mixed plastics reduces the quality of what gets through. Ball Corporation’s “50 States of Recycling” report found that only 32% of the material value in the packaging waste stream is being captured for recycling nationally, with an estimated $6.5 billion worth of valuable materials going to landfills every year.
Glass — infinitely recyclable, heavy, and breaking your recycling bin
Glass can be recycled indefinitely. Glass bottle recycling rates are 63% in deposit-return states versus 24% in non-deposit states. The chemistry isn’t the problem. Glass is heavy relative to its value, expensive to transport, and when it breaks in single-stream recycling bins, the shards contaminate paper, cardboard, and plastic in the same load. Many MRFs treat broken glass as a contaminant to be removed rather than a material to be recovered. Some municipalities have dropped glass from curbside programs entirely because the contamination costs outweigh the recovery value.
Flexible packaging — the fastest-growing format and the hardest to recycle
Chip bags, candy wrappers, snack pouches, frozen food bags, cereal box liners, coffee bags, pet food bags, single-serve condiment packets. Flexible packaging is the fastest-growing segment in food packaging because it’s lighter and cheaper than rigid containers — every time a brand switches from a bottle to a pouch, they save on material and shipping weight.
The recycling problem is structural. Flexible food packaging is typically a multi-layer laminate — thin films of different polymers (PE, PP, PET, nylon) often bonded with aluminum foil and barrier layers (EVOH), plus inks, adhesives, and tie layers. Each layer serves a specific function: moisture barrier, oxygen barrier, light barrier, structural support, printability. The combination of layers is what makes the packaging work for food preservation and what makes it unrecyclable. Multilayer barrier films account for a large share of flexible packaging production and are predominantly landfilled or incinerated because their bonded layers are incompatible with standard mechanical recycling.
MRF sorting equipment cannot effectively process flexible films — they wrap around machinery, jam screens, and contaminate other sorted materials. Even if sorted successfully, the multi-layer construction means mechanical recycling degrades the material, and the ink layer is as hard to remove as an incompatible polymer. California’s EPR rules are pushing brands toward mono-material films, but multilayer laminates still dominate most shelves. The European Commission has set a goal to make all multilayer packaging reusable or recyclable by 2030. Nobody has demonstrated how to do that at scale.
Plastic film — recyclable in theory, rejected by every curbside program
Grocery bags, bread bags, produce bags, bubble wrap, shrink wrap, shipping mailers. Single-layer plastic film (typically PE) is technically recyclable — it can be collected, baled, and processed into composite lumber or new film. Trex is the most prominent buyer, using recovered PE film to make composite decking. The problem is collection: curbside programs universally reject film because it jams MRF equipment. The alternative is store drop-off bins (the plastic bag return bins at grocery stores), which have low participation rates and uncertain downstream outcomes.
A few companies have built collection programs for film and flexible plastics that curbside won’t take. Ridwell offers a mail-in service that accepts plastic film and multi-layer food packaging via prepaid USPS bags, reaching 130,000 customers and reporting low contamination rates on collected material. Store drop-off bins at grocery chains collect PE film for buyers like Trex, which turns it into composite decking. Both models face the same question: what happens downstream when collection outpaces end-market demand for the recovered material. Beyond Plastics has argued that mail-back collection without guaranteed closed-loop end markets risks becoming a form of greenwashing. The operators disagree, and the question is unresolved.
Polystyrene foam — banned in some places, unrecyclable in most
Foam trays, foam clamshells, foam cups. Expanded polystyrene (EPS) is mostly air by volume, making it expensive to transport relative to the tiny amount of material recovered. Food contamination from grease and liquids makes most food-service polystyrene unrecyclable even where programs exist. A growing number of cities and states have banned EPS food service ware. Where it’s not banned, it mostly goes to landfill, where it fragments into smaller pieces but doesn’t biodegrade.
Paper and cardboard — high recycling rates when clean, worthless when food-contaminated
Corrugated cardboard has a 96.5% recycling rate — the highest of any packaging material. The system works because cardboard is valuable, easy to sort, and has strong end markets in new paperboard manufacturing. Paper-based food packaging is a different story. Pizza boxes with grease, paper plates with food residue, paper cups with plastic liners, paper cartons with wax or PE coatings — food contamination turns recyclable paper into compost at best and landfill at worst. The plastic or wax liner in a paper cup or carton makes it a multi-material product that most recycling facilities reject.
Food residue is the single largest source of contamination
Across every packaging type, food residue is what turns recyclable material into reject. A clean PET bottle recycles. A PET bottle with dried yogurt in it contaminates the bale. A clean aluminum can recycles. A can with food residue gets flagged. The EPA estimates approximately 25% of items placed in recycling bins are contaminants, and food residue is the leading cause. The fix is to rinse containers before recycling, which is straightforward but widely skipped.
Compostable food packaging needs infrastructure that doesn’t exist
Compostable cups, plates, bowls, and utensils made from PLA or similar materials need industrial composting facilities with sustained high temperatures to break down. Most US municipalities don’t operate these facilities at scale. Where they do exist, many don’t accept compostable plastics because they can’t distinguish them from conventional plastic at the sorting stage. A compostable fork that ends up in a recycling bin contaminates the plastic stream. A compostable fork that ends up in landfill doesn’t compost — it sits there in anaerobic conditions like everything else.
Deposit-return works and 40 states don’t have it
States with deposit-return systems account for 27% of the population and provide 47% of all packaging recycled, 51% of all aluminum cans and glass bottles recycled, and 61% of all PET bottles recycled in the country. The national beverage container recycling rate is approximately 33%; states with bottle bills average 70%. Michigan’s 10-cent deposit produced a 97% recycling rate from 1990 to 2008. The mechanism is proven across 57 jurisdictions worldwide. 81% of US voters support deposit-return programs. Industry lobbying has prevented adoption in most states.
EPR is restructuring the economics but the systems are still being built
Multiple US states have passed EPR for packaging, including California, Colorado, Maine, Oregon, and Washington. California’s SB 54 alone will cover every piece of single-use packaging sold in the state. The mechanism shifts end-of-life costs from municipalities to producers and eco-modulates fees based on recyclability — meaning brands using hard-to-recycle flexible packaging pay more. The EPA projects that expanding recycling access and infrastructure nationally could capture an additional 38–45 million tons of packaging material, but achieving that would require significant investment in collection, sorting, and processing capacity.
California’s program is being watched closely across the industry, and whether it changes behavior depends on the fee level. Set high enough, eco-modulated fees push brands to redesign packaging to avoid them; set too low, brands pay the fee and change nothing. It’s too early to know which way it will go.
What solving this is worth
The US aluminum industry recycles more than 40 billion cans per year. An estimated $6.5 billion worth of valuable packaging materials are lost to US landfills annually. Global demand for recycled packaging feedstock is rising as brands respond to EPR fees and buyer specifications for post-consumer content.
The deposit-return lever is the most immediately actionable. A national bottle bill would recover substantially more aluminum, PET, and glass than the current patchwork of voluntary programs. The infrastructure already exists in 10 states; scaling it nationally is a political problem more than a technical one.
The flexible packaging problem is where the most value is locked. Multi-layer laminates are the fastest-growing format and the least recyclable. Mono-material flexible packaging that performs comparably to multi-layer, or a delamination process that separates layers economically at scale, would open a market that currently has no recovery pathway at all. Research into solvent-based and chemical separation of multilayer films and design-for-recycling guidelines pushing toward mono-material films are early but pointed in the right direction.
EPR fees will reshape packaging economics. When brands pay according to recyclability, choosing a hard-to-recycle format finally carries a direct cost.
The challenge
Aluminum cans prove that closed-loop food packaging recycling works when the collection incentive is right — deposit-return states get 68% versus 22% without. PET bottle-to-bottle recycling proves that plastic food packaging can be closed loop when the material is simple enough. Corrugated cardboard proves that paper-based packaging recycles at very high rates when it’s clean and has strong end markets.
Everything else — flexible pouches, multi-layer films, foam, lined paper, compostable ware — doesn’t have a working pathway. The format that’s growing fastest (flexible) is the one with no solution. The collection mechanism that works (deposit-return) exists in 10 states and not 50. The regulatory shift (EPR) is underway in five states and the rest are watching.
If you have an approach — a mono-material flexible packaging design that matches multi-layer performance, a delamination or separation technology for laminates, a collection model that achieves deposit-return capture rates without legislation, a composting infrastructure play, a sorting technology that handles film without jamming, or something from a completely different field — describe what you’d propose and why it would work.
Get in touch to share your approach. The most compelling responses get published below this briefing and may lead to longer interviews.
Proposed approaches
None yet. This section grows as responses come in.
Research note
Research for this briefing used AI tools to identify, gather, and cross-reference public data sources. Every factual claim is hyperlinked to a third-party source and was verified before publishing. The analysis, framing, and editorial judgment are human. If any sourced claim is inaccurate or outdated, get in touch — corrections are published promptly.