Getting To Know TLMI’s Newest Initiative
By: Rosalyn Bandy, TLMI VP of Sustainability
As a sustainability professional in the label industry, I have faced the same questions year in and year out about release liner – how do we help a customer meet their sustainability goals when release liner is so difficult to recycle? The recycling process involves collecting, sorting, and processing liners so that they can be used as raw materials in the production of new products. The obstacles to liner recycling are many: most waste haulers won’t take it, it must be stored indoors until there is a full truckload, there is no space to store it, many recyclers want it to be baled, there’s too much contamination, shipping is costly, silicone is hard to deal with and on and on. Because of these obstacles, liners are typically discarded to landfill after use.
I admire the TLMI members that have created programs, with dedicated personnel, to try to help their customers recycle their liner, but those programs face the same challenges and have not had broad, industry-changing success. TLMI’s liner-recycling committee has also been working for years on solutions including a map of recyclers, technical documents, PowerPoint presentations for members to use with customers, and one-page information sheets. A few years ago, an industry coalition was formed in North America called CELAB, which stands for Circular Economy for Labels. CELAB had numerous work streams, created some good research and connections, but also had no recycling success.
Paper and filmic liner production is estimated at nearly 600,000 tons per year. Recycling these liners not only reduces waste in landfills but would also conserve resources by reusing materials. Paper liner, specifically, is an incredibly clean, long fiber that has value and we know that many types of fiber are widely recycled across the U.S.
The Liner Recycling Initiative. This Spring, TLMI invited CELAB NA to merge efforts on getting paper release liner recycled. It resulted in a new project called the Liner Recycling Initiative (LRI). We have hired recycling expert Resource Recycling Systems (RRS), a global consultancy known for getting non-recyclables like cartons, paper cups, and poly-coated paper into recycling streams, to drive this initiative and be our boots on the ground with recycling mills.
Project Goals: The aim of the project is to develop a robust national release liner recycling program that connects both small and large label endusers that generate paper release liner to qualified recycling end markets.
The key goals of this work are the following:
- Build upon the learnings and recycling experience of the label industry to date.
- Identify best practices for convenient collection and aggregation of release liner for truckload and less-than-truckload shipments.
- Identify and develop specifications for recycling mills that accept and recycle paper release liner.
- Elevate all existing liner recycling programs by developing an industry roadmap to scale a recycling strategy nationally.
Project Strategy: Two regional pilots, in Chicagoland and the northeast U.S. are planned around mills that are known to accept and recycle paper release liner.
- To start, the pilot will confirm the requirements for release liner for the mills; i.e., what form it needs to be in, how much contamination is allowed, how it is packaged.
- Then, with label industry help, RRS will identify endusers, both large (at least one truckload per month) and small (less than one truckload per month), that “liberate” release liner, to participate in the regional pilots.
- RRS will establish best operational practices for those endusers around how to collect, aggregate, and bring this valued fiber product to market for recycling.
- The best practices and learnings from the pilots will be used to develop a roadmap that scales the recycling program nationally.
- A national roadmap will also include identifying and qualifying mills willing to develop a mill specification for release liner commingled with corrugated cardboard or sorted office paper.
The mill partner for the pilot programs is Sustana Fiber. One of the next critical steps is to ask label converters to share with RRS (with NDA in place) locations of where release liner is “liberated” and labels are applied. These could be e-commerce fulfillment centers, brands, copackers, or retailers, for example. Ideally, they would be located within 250 miles of the Sustana mills. This will help with RRS conducting site visits to help with operational best practices and to understand logistics obstacles. This collaboration sets the stage for broader industry acceptance and a significant reduction in environmental impact. To achieve a scalable recycling program, RRS will also work with brown fiber mills to include release liner in their process. The ability of endusers to bale release liner with corrugated cardboard will solve many of the sorting, storage, and shipping obstacles they currently face.
Want to be part of this effort or recommend a customer that generates paper liner? Contact me and I’ll connect you with our RRS team to get you started. Rosalyn.bandy@tlmi.com