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Olefins Technical Committee

The Olefins Technical Committee develops and maintains the following for rigid olefin packaging through working group projects, technical studies, and educational materials:

Verifying and expanding APR’s Design® Guidance for rigid polyolefin-based packaging by developing and publishing guidance test protocols, encouraging APR members to test and verify design guidance, and urging packaging designers and manufacturers to use these tests to determine recycling compatibility
Ensuring that APR’s existing technical tools, such as the APR Design® Guide for Plastics Recyclability and bale specifications, are current with regard to rigid polyolefin recycling, adaptable to changes in collection schemes and end markets, and easily accessible
Expand APR Design® Recognition criteria to enable packaging designers, producers, and purchasing agents to ensure their products meet the highest criteria for recyclability according to the APR Design® Guide for Plastics Recyclability
Review and evolve APR model bale specifications based on changes in the MRF stream, sortation technology, markets, and packaging design

This committee has:

Broadened the formats of HDPE Containers from just blow molded containers
Expanded the Preferred APR Design® Recognition program to include full packaging constructs for PP and colored HDPE
Tightened density guidance to ensure that PP and HDPE containers that reach reclaimers are not lost as waste due to fillers
Currently developing elutriation testing standard to ensure consistent and reproducible lab testing globally

Current Working Groups

Elutriation

This working group is creating a standard “recipe” for elutriation calibration that can be reproduced reliably and accessibly in lab testing. This will help ensure reproducibility across all testing labs and allow APR Technical Committees to develop further guidance on packaging design with a focus on losses during the elutriation step in the recycling process.

Polyolefin Contamination

It is known that the presence of PP reduces the performance of recycled HDPE and vice versa. While APR has guidance to reduce this issue, there are gaps that include dispensers and other features. This working group focuses on pinpointing and developing guidance to close the gaps.

Clear Polypropylene Guidance

Currently, APR only has guidance on a colored PP stream. As there is growing interest in a clear and food grade PP stream, we need to ensure that clear PP packaging is designed in a way to increase the yield and quality of the resulting rPP.

Direct Printing

As more packaging formats such as tubes that are designed to be compatible with the recycling stream are entering the market, ensuring that printing does not detrimentally affect the resulting recyclate is becoming an area of interest. This working group studies and develops guidance regarding allowable printing colors, coverage, etc. to enable converters to develop packaging compatible with the recycling stream.

HDPE Protocol Revision/Expansion Working Group

This working group has two topics within scope:

Provide more detailed guidance in the color space for natural HDPE in order to improve quality and yield of the most valuable plastic recycling stream.
Develop a benchmark testing protocol for HDPE that will allow innovators to perform a truncated testing protocol confirming whether an innovation/packaging component can pass all the critical process steps within the recycling process without negative impacts.