How do you recycle your consumer-facing large pack Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burger packaging? You can’t! Big industry supply chain forces along with commonly expected, practiced, and accepted marketing norms lead to heavy branding on consumer packaging in order to be competitive. So even leading pure-play brands, that hope to have a lasting impact on environmental warming, often succumb to the industry-at-large recycling debacle.

Manufacturers routinely fuse incompatible recyclable materials together, such as embedding heavy metal coils inside plastic pump dispensers or pairing glass bottles with metal caps. This intentional mixing of entirely different material grades in everyday packaging design renders automated sorting and melting processes completely ineffective. When a single incompatible item enters the stream, it compromises the entire operational line, sending perfectly sorted materials directly into municipal landfills or incinerators.

This crisis extends to flexible packaging and laminated multi-layer packaging composites. Popular accidentally-vegan consumer products such as Sweet Chili Doritos, Lay’s Classic, and even one core ingredient whole food product brands such as Wonderful Pistachios, rely on complex plastic-foil laminates where micro-thin aluminum layers are bonded with protective resins. These blended polymers create entirely new structural materials that standard mechanical recycling centers cannot split apart. When these laminates melt alongside recyclable plastics, they chemically contaminate the entire resin batch, rendering tons of high-value recycling raw material useless, unmarketable, and therefore not reused to make new materials.

While heavily branded cereal products often offer a paperboard box that’s fully recyclable, its inner plastic liner bag is typically a high-density polyethylene film that cannot be processed through your home recycling bin because its flexible shape gets tangled in those recycling facility sorting gears. As important as it is to choose to recycle, it is important to be discerning about how and what you recycle. Continue to follow The Vegan Digest for recycling alerts.