Mr. Clean, Meet Mr. Plastic
Since 2010, John Layman has led the charge to increase the amount of recycled plastic used in Procter & Gamble’s products and packaging. After analyzing and testing samples of recycled plastics from various suppliers, P&G’s senior scientist and his R&D team realized that the poor quality of recycled plastic — specifically, polypropylene — was standing in their way and decided to take matters into their own hands.
P2PI Magazine recently spoke with Layman and Tracey Long, director of scientific communications in corporate R&D at P&G, about the company’s licensing partnership with Orlando, Florida-based PureCycle Technologies to deploy purified recycled polypropylene under the trademarked name VersoVita, and its hopes that others will adopt the technology to reduce virgin plastic use and cut carbon emissions.
P2PI: How significant is this development for the consumer products industry?
Layman: Polypropylene is an absolutely essential material for humanity. You’ve touched it many times today, maybe not even realizing it. If you go to the hospital, it’s in all of the plastic syringes and all the tubing. It’s an amazingly efficient material, and it’s so versatile that we use it from everything from diapers to razors to toothbrushes.
P2PI: Why has it been so difficult to find high-quality recyclable polypropylene?
Layman: Think about the typical community’s home recycling bin. We put everything in one place to make it easier for people to recycle. But all these things get mixed together into a plastic soup that contains all sorts of cross-contamination — yogurt cups mixed with motor oil and cleaning products. When you recover this raw material to make premium consumer goods, you have to make sure you’ve removed that contamination before you reuse it again.
P2PI: Can you explain how you invented the purification process in simple terms?
Layman: We are using a solvent-based process to effectively dry clean polypropylene molecules at the molecular level. We use the solvent to pull away a lot of the contaminants that would be inside the recycled plastic. And by solvent, we don’t mean water. It’s not hot water. But it’s a substance that’s non-toxic and is set up to be used in this way.
P2PI: What will the next phase of your journey look like?
Layman: PureCycle is currently building a commercial-scale facility that is expected to come online early next year. We are looking forward to having this material shipped to us and using the recycled polypropylene in many different applications across our portfolio.
Long: We frankly could have chosen to keep the process to ourselves, but we felt like it was a technology that was so important to the broader industry, even outside of consumer goods. There are so many applications.
P2PI: And how will you be getting the message out to consumers?
Long: I can’t speak to any future VersoVita campaigns, but many of our brands have had specific [sustainability] claims right on the actual package. So you will see a variety of our brands communicating messages where they think that it matters to the consumer, and that the consumer is looking for reassurance that we’re being very sustainability minded. You’ll often see those claims come through on the package, on our websites and in various communications.
