While Dow is the biggest global producer of virgin PE, its efforts toward reducing the overall impact of plastics have gained steam, company representatives said during an interview at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in San Diego.
The company supplies high-performance resins into packaging and durable goods, but “we do not want any of that to go to landfill, and so we see a lot of value” in the recycled resin portfolio, said Heather Turner, sustainability director for packaging and specialty plastics at Dow North America.
She noted that the recycled resin portfolio complements new and planned capacity including Dow’s new PE plant in Texas that started up in 2025, as well as plans for a net-zero ethane cracker in Alberta. These investments are meant to meet projected long-term demand for ethylene and its derivatives, she said, echoing comments from CEO Jim Fitterling in recent earnings calls.
And while sales of PE remain lackluster three years into a global downturn in demand, and reclaimers cite cheap virgin resin as their most pressing issue, Turner said the company is seeing an increase in sales of its PCR resins, with some tailwinds from recycled content mandates in a handful of states.
Nevertheless, “it’s just a really challenging time overall, when merchant pricing [for virgin resin] is as low as it is,” she said. In the meantime, the company’s recycled resin team emphasizes to customers the benefits of incorporating PCR, such as a lower carbon footprint and a closed loop back into stretch and shrink films, Turner noted.
And those challenges are not unique to North America. In Europe last August, Dow and partner Mura Technology canceled plans for a chemical recycling plant in Bohlen, Germany, citing the “broader industrial context in Europe, where persistent economic and regulatory challenges continue to impact the competitiveness of manufacturing investments, including those aimed at achieving sustainability goals,” according to a statement.
Using design to leverage eco-modulated fees
With extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging gaining steam in the US and Europe, Dow is taking particular note of eco-modulation of fees. State-level or regional EPR laws favor levying lower fees to less objectionable materials and packaging designs.
“At Dow we’ve known for a really long time that if a package was going to make it down the line to be recycled, it would need to start from the beginning,” said Adwoa Mansa Coleman, senior business sustainability manager at Dow. With eco-modulation in mind, she said, “it’s really prime time for producers to look at their portfolios and switch from harder to recycle materials to things like formats that can be recycled.”
Coleman added that “we sit at the spot where we have some influence on that, right from when we make our resins,” pointing to Pack Studios, a collaborative space where engineers use Dow’s innovations to help design packages that are purpose-fit but also designed to be recycled.
Collaboration in the value chain
In addition to its own work in recycling, Dow has partnered with numerous other entities, including a Google X Moonshot innovation lab project, Goodwill and Procter & Gamble.
On the Materra project – formerly called Moonshot for Circularity – Dow is providing information to help develop AI that will enable more granular sorting of recyclables.
During the “Future Forward” session at the 2026 Resource Recycling Conference, co-located in San Diego with the plastics conference, Materra project lead Rey Banabao said Dow is a good example of a producer that has started to vertically integrate, pointing to the acquisition of mechanical film recycler Circulus in 2024.
Since buying Circulus, Dow has seen opportunities to improve product quality as well as its overall analytics, Turner said. “We’re not a recycler, and so this is an excellent opportunity for us to use our material science expertise,” she added.
Banatao noted that because of Dow’s growing understanding of the processes and costs involved in getting film to the downstream product, “There’s a lot of good learning by working with a partner like Dow and figuring out how to tackle this.”
He added: “It’s a tough problem – I’m not going to lie.”
Film and flexible packaging contain different percentages of molecular materials that are difficult to measure in current sorting technologies. But “as both a producer and recycler of these materials, Dow is providing us with the real-world data we need to tune our molecular models to films and flexibles and test the accuracy of our system for recycling,” Banatao wrote in an April 2025 blog post.
In the same conference session, Goodwill’s Beth Forsberg said, “Dow is one of several partners that have been really, really game-changing for us.”
Dow is partnering with Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona on the GoodFlex pilot to provide a scalable recycling solution for post-consumer plastic film. The project will leverage Goodwill’s retail network and materials recovered from existing donation streams to collect, sort and process plastic bags to be recycled into various Dow applications.
Forsberg noted that a persistent question in circularity projects is whether it makes economic sense for Goodwill to recover a certain material from its donation stream. “And because we don’t know how much or what we have, how to grade it, I can’t answer these questions.”
Dow provided funding for waste characterization studies so Goodwill can look at volumes starting in Arizona, with plans to scale material recovery efforts to other Goodwill organizations nationally, particularly in California and other states with existing EPR legislation.
In 2022, Dow partnered with hauler WM on a residential pilot program in Hickory Hills, Illinois, for curbside collection of packaging film such as bread bags and shrink wrap. A Chicago-area MRF processed the materials, and WM previously told Plastics Recycling Update the pilot had concluded in 2023 servicing 3,500 households, but did not provide further details.
Dow also is partnering with Procter & Gamble on developing dissolution recycling technology for PE. lso is partnering with Procter & Gamble on developing dissolution recycling technology for PE.
