Dive Brief:
- The National Association for PET Container Resources shared a road map on Tuesday with strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from PET bottle production in the United States.
- Following these guidelines could collectively cut the industry’s life-cycle GHG emissions by 57% per 1,000 gallons of beverages consumed by 2050, according to the report. Even taking into account production growth, the industry could reduce total annual emissions by as much as 42%.
- Many strategies to achieve this decarbonization already are available across the PET value chain, according to NAPCOR. The report cites lightweighting as a prime strategy to accelerate emissions reductions.
Dive Insight:
NAPCOR released the report at a time when PET markets face numerous disruptions.
Recycled PET markets are in a prolonged period of instability that has resulted in a wave of reclaimer closures totaling an estimated 25% production capacity loss in the U.S. The industry partly blames cheap imports and stiff competition from virgin resin prices. Trump administration tariffs along with resin supply chain and pricing disruptions stemming from the war with Iran are also impacting PET markets.
In addition, bottle recovery for recycling may be trending downward. NAPCOR reported in July that recovery volumes in 2024 for PET and HDPE bottles decreased by 89.3 million pounds compared with 2022. Still, the group noted with its decarbonization road map release that PET is the most recycled plastic globally.
This is also a time “when brand owners and beverage companies are making decisions on what really is their long-term plan when it comes to packaging material of choice,” said Srinivasan “Shankar” Prabhushankar, technical director at NAPCOR, noting that the roadmap can aid the decision making.
NAPCOR commissioned the new report from independent environmental consulting firm Eastern Research Group, building on a previous life-cycle assessment from 2023. That study looked at four common PET bottle sizes and used their carbon intensity per 1,000 gallons of beverage as the baseline for this new road map.
The road map highlights scalable, cost-effective carbon reduction strategies such as improving manufacturing energy efficiency and using more rPET. Lightweighting delivers the largest decrease in emissions, according to the report.
“Lightweighting has been happening in the PET industry for quite some time ... and now there are more technologies coming out. Some are already being tested,” Prabhushankar said. “What we are saying is these are credible methodologies where the proof is there that this is achievable.”
The report authors note that the named carbon reduction strategies are not exhaustive and are based on current and emerging technologies that NAPCOR members identified during surveys. The report also acknowledges that the decarbonization model assumes linear adoption of the short- and long-term strategies, but real-world uptake likely will be nonlinear and uneven.
Adoption will first be driven by internal business decisions and over time by external factors such as policy, market dynamics and technology readiness, according to the report. It’s critical to leverage external factors such as policy, more investments and collection system improvements “to establish a much better circular economy and ensure the recycled content goals we are talking about are achieved,” Prabhushankar said
The authors suggest that NAPCOR should conduct a follow-up study “once high-quality data become available for emerging decarbonization pathways,” such as bio-based PET resin, chemical recycling and carbon capture, utilization and storage. To that end, NAPCOR is discussing the potential to do a follow-up in five years, Prabhushankar said. That would allow the group to “see how much we have improved and where we are heading.”
The road map’s strategies can apply to geographies outside the U.S. as well as to other packaging formats, Prabhushankar said. For example, “take a clamshell or a drink cup that's made of PET. You can see even those are constantly being lightweighted,” he said.
