There’s Finally a Way to Recycle the Plastic in Shampoo and Yogurt Packaging

In the U.S., more than 25 million tons of plastic a year ends up in landfills. Polypropylene—the rigid plastic favored for deodorant containers and shampoo bottles—is one of the biggest culprits. Just 3% of it gets recycled—compared with about 29% for polyethylene terephthalate soda bottles—because of technical problems. Now a scientist at Procter & Gamble Co. thinks he’s solved them.

It’s difficult and expensive to rid recycled polypropylene of the smell of the product it housed in 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.