Avery Dennison > Blogs > Beyond the Bin: Why Design for Recycling Matters

Beyond the Bin: Why Design for Recycling Matters

By Avery Dennison Sustainability Team, Asia Pacific

Published on 8 October 2025

We’ve all stood in front of the recycling bin, holding a piece of packaging, wondering, "Can this actually be recycled?" The confusion is common. While we focus on sorting our waste correctly, the real story of recycling begins long before a product ever reaches our hands. It starts on the designer's drawing board.

Design for recycling is a simple yet powerful idea: creating products in a way that makes them easy to take apart and recycle at the end of their life. This approach is crucial for cutting down waste, conserving resources, and building a truly circular economy. This post will explore why thoughtful design is the key to unlocking a more sustainable future.

You will learn:

The common design flaws that hinder recycling.
How smart design choices can dramatically improve recycling rates.
Examples of pioneering brands leading the way.
The role of design in building a circular economy.

The Problem: When Good Intentions Go to Waste

Many products that seem recyclable end up in landfills or incinerators. This is often not due to a lack of effort from consumers, but because of fundamental design flaws that make recycling difficult, expensive, or even impossible.

The Challenge of Mixed Materials

One of the biggest obstacles is the use of multiple, inseparable materials. Think of crisp packets made from layers of plastic and aluminium foil, or coffee cups with a plastic lining fused to the paper shell. While these multi-layer designs are effective for preserving food, they are a nightmare for recyclers. Separating these bonded materials requires complex, costly processes that most facilities are not equipped to handle.

Similarly, items like pumps on soap dispensers contain various plastics and a metal spring. Without being fully dismantled, the entire unit is treated as contamination and rejected. The design makes it convenient for use but inconvenient for recycling.

The Confusion of Colour and Additives

The colour of a material can also determine its fate. Black plastic, for instance, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Most sorting facilities use near-infrared (NIR) sensors to identify different types of plastic. Black pigments absorb this light, making the items invisible to the scanners. As a result, tonnes of high-quality black plastic trays and bottles are sent to landfill.

Additives and labels can cause further problems. Shrink-wrap sleeves made from a different type of plastic than the bottle they cover can confuse sorting machines. Paper labels with strong adhesives can leave behind a residue that contaminates the plastic pulp, reducing the quality of the recycled material.

The Solution: Designing for a Second Life

Design for recycling flips the script by making end-of-life management a core part of the product development process. It involves making conscious choices about materials, construction, and labelling to ensure a product can be efficiently recovered.

1. Make Efficient PET Recycling Possible

One of the most widely used plastics in packaging is PET (polyethylene terephthalate), commonly found in beverage bottles and food containers. PET is highly recyclable, but the presence of traditional labels and adhesives can lower the quality of the recycled plastic by leaving behind residue or contaminating the recycling stream.

Innovations like Avery Dennison's CleanFlake technology are helping to address this challenge. CleanFlake labels use a specially designed adhesive that cleanly separates from PET flakes during the recycling wash process. This allows the PET to be more easily processed into high-quality, food-grade recycled material, supporting a closed-loop recycling system. By improving the recyclability of PET packaging, solutions like CleanFlake are making it easier for brands to meet sustainability goals while reducing contamination in the recycling stream.

2. Embrace Monomaterials

The simplest way to improve recyclability is to use a single material wherever possible. A bottle, cap, and label all made from the same type of plastic (like PET) can be processed together without issue. This eliminates the need for separation and reduces contamination, resulting in a higher-quality recycled material that can be used to make new products.

Companies are starting to innovate in this area. For example, some brands are moving towards monomaterial pouches for things like baby food and pet food, which were previously unrecyclable. These new designs provide the same shelf-life benefits without the end-of-life headache.

3. Design for Disassembly (DfD)

When using multiple materials is unavoidable, the next best thing is to design the product so it can be easily taken apart. This means avoiding strong glues and complex bonded layers. Instead, designers can use click-fittings, simple screws, or water-soluble adhesives.

A great example is the shift in electronics. Some forward-thinking brands are creating smartphones and laptops that can be repaired and disassembled with standard tools. This not only makes it easier to replace parts but also allows for the clean separation of valuable components like glass, metal, and plastic for recycling.

4. Rethink Labels and Colours

Smart design also addresses the issues of sorting. To combat the black plastic problem, material scientists have developed NIR-detectable black pigments that allow sensors to identify the items correctly. Another solution is to switch to lighter-coloured or clear plastic, which has a higher value in recycling markets.

When it comes to labels, the solution is twofold. Perforated sleeves make it easy for consumers to remove the label before recycling. Alternatively, using "wash-off" adhesives means the labels separate cleanly from the container during the recycling process, preventing contamination.

Brands Leading the Charge

Several brand owners are showing what is possible when design for recycling becomes a priority.

Sprite, for example, famously switched from its iconic green bottles to clear ones. Green PET plastic has limited uses when recycled, often being turned into fibre or strapping. Clear PET, however, can be recycled back into high-quality, food-grade bottles, closing the loop. This simple colour change significantly increased the value and utility of the recycled material.

Another pioneer is Loop, a circular shopping platform that partners with major brands to redesign packaging for reuse. Products are delivered in durable, custom-designed containers (like a stainless steel ice cream tub) that are collected, professionally cleaned, and refilled. This is the ultimate form of design for recycling—designing out waste entirely by creating packaging that never needs to be thrown away.

Paving the Way for a Circular Economy

Design for recycling is a cornerstone of the circular economy—an economic model that aims to eliminate waste and keep materials in use for as long as possible. In a linear "take-make-waste" system, we extract resources, create products, and then discard them. This is unsustainable and incredibly wasteful.

By designing products for easy recycling, we create clean streams of materials that can be fed back into the production cycle. This reduces our reliance on virgin resources like oil, trees, and metals, which in turn cuts down on the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with their extraction and processing. It transforms waste from a problem to be managed into a valuable resource.

Conclusion: Our Collective Responsibility

The power to build a truly effective recycling system lies not just with consumers sorting their bins, but with the designers and brands who decide what our products are made of. By prioritising monomaterials, designing for easy disassembly, and making smart choices about colours and labels, companies can create products that are built for a second, third, and fourth life.

As consumers, we can support this shift by choosing brands that are transparent about their packaging and actively investing in sustainable design. The next time you pick up a product, take a moment to look at its construction. The simplest designs are often the most sustainable. By demanding better design, we can help ensure that what we put in the recycling bin today becomes a valuable resource for tomorrow.

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