Plastic tube recyclability has ramped up rapidly, but not without some tumult | Packaging Dive

After recent design changes to enhance recyclability, the focus now turns toward scaling up tube recycling.

Plastic squeeze tubes have been an omnipresent packaging form in U.S. households for decades, but their incompatibility with single-stream recycling systems causes headaches for recyclers who receive them and brands with sustainability goals. That’s changing rapidly thanks to efforts from players along the squeeze tube value chain, but there are still major hurdles to overcome, they say, including a lawsuit over one big-name brand’s tube recyclability claims.

While squeeze tubes historically incorporated multiple strata of different materials, such as various resin exteriors with aluminum barrier layers, manufacturers are moving away from these designs, which hinder the recycling process, and toward monomaterial options. Most tubes on the market today are made from polyethylene, specifically HDPE, according to recycling research firm Stina. Currently, more than 75% of all HDPE squeeze tubes, and 90% of toothpaste tubes, on the U.S. market have designs that are compatible with recycling, according to data Stina recently released.

Reaching that 75% milestone “reduces the potential for contamination and increases reclaimer confidence in accepting plastic squeeze tubes,” said Stacey Luddy, chief operating officer at Stina. “The majority of any packaging format on the market needs to be designed for recycling to provide quality feedstock.”

Stina credits its Tube Recycling Project, which launched in 2015, with advancing recyclability for this packaging type, which has been around since the 1950s. Participants and observers have noticed the change and how quickly the impacts occurred.

“I don’t want to underemphasize how big of a change in packaging format this is,” said Scott Trenor, technical director at the Association of Plastic Recyclers. “We've essentially, in five years, transformed a 60-year-old packaging format to one that's compatible with the current recycling stream. And that's a tremendous amount of work for everyone in the supply chain.”

On the tumultuous path toward making squeeze tubes recyclable, toothpaste tubes have become a lightning rod.

One setback is a class action lawsuit filed last year against Colgate-Palmolive over the CPG company’s “breakthrough” recyclable HDPE tube, released in 2022. Plaintiffs say the company’s on-product claims that some Colgate and Tom’s of Maine monomaterial tubes are recyclable is misleading because the tube typically is not locally recyclable in practice. They said a “miniscule” number of people in the U.S. can actually recycle these tubes curbside because few MRFs accept them, despite Colgate’s claims that they can be recycled with other No. 2 HDPE containers such as milk or detergent jugs.

Colgate sought to dismiss the case, but a judge ruled in February that the company must face the lawsuit. Various deadlines to advance the case will occur this year, and a hearing has been tentatively scheduled for July 11, 2025.

Colgate now uses recyclable tubes for about 90% of its North American toothpaste SKUs, according to its recently released 2023 sustainability and social impact report. It expects to reach 95% by the end of this year and hopes for 100% by next year.

Despite the legal challenge, Colgate remains a leader in advancing tube recyclability and helping to achieve the 90% recyclability level, Trenor said. The brand also went through APR’s critical guidance protocol during the design phase.

“They were the first ones to have a recycling-compatible tube,” he said. “Since then, they kind of did an open innovation type thing — where they offered that technology to others — because they knew that they couldn't be the only one in the space in order to grow the market and also make this a large enough volume that reclaimers would would want the material.”

Many domestic MRFs are equipped to sort monomaterial plastic squeeze tubes, but in practice, few publicly advertise that they’ll accept the products. One reason is that consumers don’t easily know the difference between the recyclable versions and the multimaterial lookalike tubes, which results in nonrecyclable products ending up at MRFs and potentially causing contamination.

During a session at the Packaging Recycling Summit in November, speakers broke down which items are and aren’t recyclable at most domestic MRFs. Joy Rifkin, sustainability manager at Illinois-based recycler LRS, noted the challenges with recyclable toothpaste tubes. She explained that the optical sorters at the company’s Chicago MRF can differentiate between the monomaterial and multimaterial tubes, but the company doesn’t advertise that to prevent a potential influx of lookalikes at the facility.

“There are nonrecyclable tubes on the market. Obviously, even if you have 90% of the market, there's still 10% that are not,” Trenor said. “It's really now taking that next step on better educating the MRFs and the municipalities that these materials are recyclable.”

While Colgate is a leader in this arena, more plastic squeeze tubes broadly are sporting recyclability messaging and recycling instructions.

Butth e fact that they’re labeled recyclable doesn’t mean tubes are getting recycled. Now that the Tube Recycling Project has determined that plastic squeeze tubes technically are recyclable in modern systems, its efforts move toward focusing on proper collection, sortation and processing — and at a large enough scale to make it attractive to recyclers.

While the tubes represent a “valuable feedstock” for recyclers and manufacturers to use in making new tubes or other products containing PCR, Trenor said, the order of tasks in achieving more tube recycling is important. “Starting with MRFs first and saying, ‘You're going to take these tubes that may or may not be designed properly,’ is going to work even worse than our current system,” he said. But “the complexity with the U.S. recycling system is that it's all held and controlled locally,” which adds time and difficulty to achieving unity.

Collaboration across the value chain is critical to working through barriers to achieve higher levels of squeeze tube recycling, sources said. They noted the need to engage everyone, including brands, packaging engineers and consumers. For example, MRFs need to know that if they collect the tubes, a market exists for selling that material.

People need to understand that “recycling is an interconnected system that relies on the economic balance of supply and demand like any industry,” Luddy said. As such, “more recycled content needs to be used in products, and more of those products need to be purchased. Consumers also can play a big role in demand by buying products with recycled content.”

Boosting the amount of squeeze tubes that get recycled will take time. Even if all the tubes on the market were immediately recyclable, and every MRF suddenly accepted them, it would still take time for the products to work their way through the supply chain and use cycles to end up in the recycling stream. But Trenor is encouraged by the “huge change in the last five years” with plastic squeeze tubes and the potential for similar movement in upping the product’s recycling.