Waste Management, North America's largest trash hauler, wants to shrink plastic pollution

• America's largest waste hauler is investing in a company that recycles plastic shrink wrap.
• Flexible plastic accounts for nearly a quarter of all US plastic waste, yet only 5% gets recycled.

Nearly all of that plastic shrink-wrap around newly arrived furniture or the boxes delivered to Costco, Home Depot, and other big retailers ends up in the landfill. The same goes for plastic grocery bags.

This kind of flexible plastic accounts for nearly a quarter of the 32 million metric tons of plastic waste produced in the US each year, yet only 5% gets recycled. An acquisition by the largest waste hauler in North America this week suggests there might be a pathway to reuse much more of it.

Waste Management, which works with local governments and commercial businesses to dispose or recycle the things we discard, said on Tuesday it will acquire a controlling interest in Avangard Innovative's US business. The companies aren't disclosing the value of the deal, which is expected to close this year.

"When only 5% of this material is being recycled, that represents a big growth opportunity," Jim Fish, the president and CEO of Waste Management, told Insider. "It's also an opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves from our competition."

Avangard, a Houston-based business that handles hard-to-recycle plastics, is three decades old but has attracted a flurry of interest in recent years as big food-and-beverage brands and chemical companies pledge to use more recycled plastic. States including California, New Jersey, and Washington will require certain single-use plastic packages to contain more recycled content in the coming years.

Avangard is expanding its Houston operation and Waste Management said it will build another plant in the Midwest. Within five years, the venture could be recycling some 181,000 metric tons of plastic film, the companies said.

The material will mostly come from supermarkets and big-box stores, Tara Hemmer, Waste Management's chief sustainability officer, said. Right now, flexible plastic isn't accepted at the company's own recycling centers, but it's exploring ways to do that, Hemmer said. The deal with Avangard, which will operate under the name Natura PCR, is part of Waste Management's plan to spend up to $800 million through 2025 to automate its recycling plants and expand into underserved markets.

For now, Waste Management is focusing on Avangard's traditional mechanical-recycling capabilities — sorting, cleaning, and grinding — rather than emerging chemical-recycling technology, Hemmer said. In February, Avangard announced a partnership with Honeywell to build a chemical-recycling plant by 2023.

The plastics industry is investing billions of dollars to expand chemical, or "advanced," recycling, arguing it can handle more kinds of plastic waste. But environmentalists say it's a false solution, citing research that found most US plants operating today are small and burning plastics for fuel, not turning waste into new plastic products.

The chemical giant Dow is investing in both strategies, with more than 50 "circularity projects and partnerships" in the works, Nestor de Mattos, the North America commercial vice president of Dow's packaging arm, said. The company has been a customer of Avangard's plastic pellets since 2020, which advances Dow's goal to help collect and recycle 1 million metric tons of plastic this decade — a figure that accounts for a fraction of Dow's overall plastic production.