Film and flexible packaging play an essential role in protecting products, extending shelf life, and delivering goods to consumers in a cost-effective way. At the same time, the lightweight nature and complex, multimaterial designs common to many film packages create real challenges for collection, sorting, and recycling at scale. This new framework confronts those realities head-on—offering a pragmatic, actionable path forward grounded in today’s infrastructure, economics, and market conditions.
“Film and flexible packaging are critical to how products move through our economy and that means solving for their circularity is both necessary and complex,” said Crystal Bayliss, Interim Executive Director of the USPP. “This framework reflects the real work happening across the system today and provides a clear, shared path forward.”
While the paper focuses primarily on improving the recycling outcomes for film, it is clear in its framing: efforts to reduce packaging and scale reuse should be prioritized first, consistent with the waste hierarchy. Where recycling is pursued, the framework emphasizes that progress depends on addressing the full system—not just one part of it.
A central finding of the paper is that end market development is the most critical lever for change. Collecting more material without strong, reliable demand for recycled film risks simply shifting material without delivering real circular outcomes.
