18
From top: A worker
checks finished, clean
polypropylene resin;
the PureCycle feedstock
evaluation unit; bales
of old carpet set to be
processedin its first life. Some scents are particularly
offensive, such as gasoline or moldy yogurt. And
the recycled material ends up black or gray, which
makes it tough to reuse in packaging, so it often
ends up hidden away from the consumer’s eye
inside park benches and auto parts. “We really
want to maximize the amount of recycled plastic
we can use, but there’s a psychology to this—we
signal to consumers safety and cleanliness with
our products, so we can’t sell stuff that is in gray
or black bottles,” says John Layman, a polymer
chemist at P&G in Cincinnati who’s been working
on boosting polypropylene recycling for a decade.
Layman long focused on a sandwiching tech-
nology that’s allowed P&G to place recycled plas-
tic between layers of virgin plastic in Tide laundry
detergent bottles since the 1970s. At best, that
technique brings the amount of recycled mate-
rial in a bottle to about 25%, and it doesn’t work
if you’re trying to make a product in an injection
mold—like a toothbrush.
Around 2010, Layman turned his attention to
cleaning up the polypropylene. He says he devel-
oped a process that purifies the plastic at the
molecular level to produce clear, odorless, non-
toxic pellets that can be used to make a 100%
recycled bottle. The system requires only about30m20100
1960 2015● U.S.plasticgenerated,
in tons
◼Recycled
◼Combustedin
energyrecovery
◼ Sent to landfill