Buying the Unrecyclable: Procurement and Small-Format Packaging
For many consumer goods companies, small- format plastic packaging is unavoidable. Small, portable, regulated or single-use products require it.
As extended producer responsibility (EPR) expands and circularity expectations rise, procurement leaders must manage the risks and trade-offs this packaging category creates.
Small-format plastic packaging is a blind spot in many circular packaging strategies. This format is defined by packages smaller than 2 inches. Examples of small packaging include caps, closures, tubes, tubs, blister packs and travel-size containers used extensively across food, personal-care and home-care products.
Roughly 25 percent of global packaging units fall into the small-format category. In the U.S. alone, small rigid plastics account for tens of thousands of tons of material annually.
Even small packages made from recyclable plastics, such as polypropylene or high-density polyethylene, are not considered curbside recyclable because current recycling systems are not designed to recover them. At most material recovery facilities, small items fall through sorting screens intended to remove glass, effectively removing them from the plastics recovery stream.
For procurement teams, this means a substantial share of packaging units sourced today are structurally non-circular, regardless of consumer behavior or labeling.
Why Elimination Is Not Viable
Eliminating small-format packaging is neither practical nor desirable. Small packages serve critical functions such as product protection, shelf efficiency, price-point accessibility, regulatory compliance and consumer convenience.
In many cases, eliminating small formats would increase total material use and product waste while shifting demand to alternative materials with higher life-cycle impacts. For supply chains optimized around cost, performance and accessibility, elimination introduces new trade-offs rather than eliminating the problem. The challenge is making small-format packaging compatible with circular systems rather than removing it entirely.
Why does this matter for procurement and supplier risk? Small-format packaging presents a growing risk exposure under EPR policies. Because these items are considered unrecyclable, they are likely to carry higher fees or penalties than packaging formats with established recycling pathways. This cost differential impacts packaging budgets and product margins. In the future, some U.S. states and countries might prohibit sales of unrecyclable packaging.
There is also reputational and contractual risk. Brand commitments to circularity increasingly require suppliers to demonstrate recyclability, recycled content, or participation in recovery programs. Small formats complicate compliance, especially when recovery infrastructure does not yet exist at scale.
What Procurement Can Do Now
There are a number of things a procurement team can do if its company buys small-format packaging:
Treat small-format packaging as a strategic category. Small-format packaging is often fragmented across SKUs, suppliers and business units. Individually, each item may appear insignificant. Aggregated, the volumes may be substantial. Procurement can consolidate visibility across formats, resins, suppliers and annual volumes.
Preserve future circular options through specifications. Even when recovery pathways do not yet exist, packaging design choices today determine whether those pathways can exist in the future. Ideally, packages should be made of recyclable material that can be recovered when the infrastructure exists.
This includes using mono-material designs, avoiding unnecessary pigments or multilayer constructions, and aligning specifications with sorting technologies such as screens and computer vision.
Expand supplier conversations beyond unit cost. Small-format packaging is frequently sourced on a price-per-unit basis. Procurement can broaden those conversations to consider packaging end-of-life and ask suppliers how different formats perform under existing and emerging recovery scenarios.
Questions about EPR exposure, redesign feasibility and material alternatives shift the relationship from transactional to strategic. Procurement is uniquely positioned to help organizations adopt a systems view of packaging value.
Circularity Requires Collective Action
This issue cannot be fixed by individual initiatives. Improving circularity requires coordinated action across three parts of the system.
Suppliers and packaging designers influence material choices, package geometry, and compatibility with sorting technologies. However, design-for-recyclability delivers value only if recovery infrastructure exists downstream.
Manufacturers and brand owners control volumes, specifications and investment signals. Under EPR, they also carry increasing financial responsibility. Collective demand signals are necessary to justify investments in new recovery pathways.
Waste management and recycling systems must adapt infrastructure originally designed to exclude small items. Emerging solutions, such as recovering plastics from glass residue streams or deploying advanced vision systems, show promise but depend on predictable material flows and viable end markets.
No single actor can solve the problem alone. Procurement functions are uniquely positioned to align incentives across suppliers, brands and service providers.
Several industry efforts have emerged to address the circularity of small-format packaging, including those led by The Sustainability Consortium, Closed Loop Partners and the Glass Packaging Institute. Pact Collective has implemented a packaging takeback system for cosmetics, and the Recycling Partnership provides consultation to key actors working on this issue.
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