The Alliance to End Plastic Waste's report on "The Challenges and Solutions for Flexible Plastic Packaging Waste" offers actionable insights on how to solve the flexible plastic waste challenge in Europe and North America.

The report identifies five critical circularity enablers for flexible plastic:

Improving collection and sorting to obtain homogenous high-quality recycling feedstock, achievable through segregated waste collection and granular secondary sorting that deploys advanced detection technologies such as digital watermarking and AI-based recognition.
Enabling end-market demand for recycled material to drive systems viability and justify investment throughout the value chain. This can be facilitated through policy mechanisms such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes and mandatory Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) content targets.
De-risking investment to attract the capital necessary for infrastructure upgrades, through policy levers such as corporation tax relief, labour and energy subsidies, and concessional loans.
Establishing design-for-recyclability guidelines to harmonise material choices and reduce complexity and barriers to recycling.
Eco-modulated EPR fees to accelerate the adoption of simpler packaging design by rewarding packaging that is both recyclable and cost-efficient to process.

The Alliance drives systemic change for flexible plastic