Recoverability | UP Scorecard User Guide

Our society cannot afford to waste natural resources on a crowded planet and with limited amounts of them. Efficient product and material recovery is also a core principle of the circular economy. We need to change our food system to use fewer disposable and hard-to-recycle products and focus on packaging that can be reused, recycled, or composted. Products that can safely do any of these are critical for a sustainable and circular economy.

The UP Scorecard Recoverability metric is a qualitative rating that represents the likelihood for the product to be reused, recycled, or composted. This depends on the availability of recycling and composting infrastructure, and on the product design.

In the UP Scorecard, the following end-of-life (i.e. recovery) scenarios are considered:

1. Reuse

Reusable means a product is not created with the intent of disposal after a single use, is not conventionally disposed of after a single use, and is manufactured to withstand multiple washes and uses before it reaches the end of its useful life.

In the tool, the user can specify if a product is reusable; a product is considered reusable if it undergoes at least 5 use cycles.

2. Compost

Compostable means all the materials in a product or packaging are capable of undergoing biological decomposition in an appropriate (i.e., commercial or municipal) compost facility as part of an available program in a safe and timely manner (no more than 180 days), such that the material is not visually distinguishable and breaks down into carbon dioxide, water, inorganic compounds, and biomass suitable for use as a soil amendment (e.g., compost, soil-conditioning material, mulch), leaving no toxic residue.

Similar to the recycling challenges, composting requires a set of conditions:

Proper collection and sorting processes
Proper design for composting feasibility
Access to proper infrastructure

For these reasons, the tool lets the user specify if all those conditions are met (see customization).

3. Recycle

Recycling is a recovery operation by which waste materials are reprocessed into products, materials, or substances whether for the original or other purposes.

Recyclable vs. recycled: while many materials are deemed and labeled as recyclable, it does not mean that they will be effectively recycled. Efficient recycling only happens when several conditions are met:

Proper collection and sorting processes
Proper design for recycling feasibility
Access to dedicated infrastructure

In many regions, those conditions are not met, and many theoretically recyclable items end up as waste. For these reasons, the tool lets the user specify if all those conditions are met (see customization).

4. Littered/biodegraded

In some very limited cases, a littered packaging item may be considered recoverable in the natural environment, i.e. it is converted to a beneficial material by natural processes. This is the case for fiber, paper, and cardboard-based materials without plastic lining and harmful chemicals such as PFAS.

5. Waste

In case the preferred end-of-life scenarios are not eligible, disposable food packaging usually ends up as waste. It can then be land-filled, incinerated, or littered, i.e. it is not recoverable. Regional statistics determine the recovery mix of land-filling and incineration. Incineration facilities often recover heat for energy, but their operation relies on fees from waste generators. Impacts from incineration are assigned to the product being burned using the cutoff method.

Indicator: scale from 1 to 5

The Recoverability metric is a qualitative rating that represents the potential for the material to be reused, recycled, composted, or turned into something useful by nature. This metric considers compostability, packaging design for recyclability, and material persistence. All materials are ranked in one of five performance tiers (see below). The tiers, and placement of materials within the tiers, were developed through interviews with experts outside the project team. More details are provided in the detailed methodology under Recoverability.

Each material class has a score that applies if the material is recovered (recycled, composted, etc.) and another score if the material is sent to disposal (landfill or incineration).

To be considered “recovered”, two distinct criteria must be met:

the product’s design is “optimized” for recovery, and
the infrastructure to recycle or compost the material must be available.

Considering these factors, a rating between 1 and 5 is given to a product according to the following (ratings are then normalized to a score from 1/worst to 100/best):

This metric provides a complement to the cutoff (i.e. Recycled Content) method used for the life cycle metrics. While the cutoff method does provide for lower impacts due to the avoidance of disposal processes (land-filling and/or incineration without energy recovery), it does not give avoided burden credits for recycling. The Recoverability metric does, however, provide higher scores for materials that are designed to be recycled. Thus, the tool addresses both “ends” of the recycling system: the use of Recycled Content as raw material inputs, and the ability to recover those materials after their use as food service products.

Example scores

The graphic below shows the Recovery scores calculated in the tool for disposable and reusable cups made of different materials.