As Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees are increasingly tied to proven recycling success, Colgate-Palmolive is partnering with Deepnest to track how its packaging actually performs inside active recycling facilities. By capturing real-world sorting data, the partnership aims to optimise designs, manage costs, and build the evidence needed to ensure formats like toothpaste tubes are successfully sorted and recycled at scale.
For decades, packaging recyclability has been assessed at the design stage – whether a material is theoretically capable of being recycled. What has not been systematically measured is what happens next: whether that material is actually sorted, recovered and kept in the value chain once it reaches a materials recovery facility (MRF), the plant where discarded material is sorted and prepared for recycling.
Colgate-Palmolive is working with Deepnest to measure how its packaging performs inside operating recovery facilities, using our packaging waste intelligence platform to replace industry-wide assumptions with real-world, statistically significant data on how packaging components are sorted and recovered. The collaboration gives Colgate-Palmolive facility-level evidence to guide packaging design strategies.
Nowhere is that gap between design intent and recovery reality clearer than in the tube. Colgate-Palmolive has moved its toothpaste tubes to recyclable mono-material HDPE, a significant redesign away from the plastic-aluminium laminates that could not be recycled at all. But a tube being recyclable by design does not mean it is recovered in practice. Tubes tend to be small, they flatten on conveyor belts and can be misdirected into 2D paper streams, with many facilities not being historically been set up to process them. Design-stage certification cannot tell a brand which of these things is happening, where, or how often. Real-world measurement about what exactly happens to tubes in the waste sorting facility can.
That evidence does more than sharpen the next design decision: it changes the conversations a brand can have beyond its own walls. Verified, facility-level recovery data gives Colgate-Palmolive a factual basis for engaging the regulators and competent authorities who administer EPR schemes via eco-modulation driven fees, and the municipalities and waste operators who decide what is collected and how it is sorted. Showing that a redesigned tube can be recovered, and identifying precisely where in the system it is currently being lost, turns a recyclability claim into a shared, data-backed case for updating collection guidance, sorting configuration and eco-modulation criteria. It also lets the brand target its own efforts – focusing engagement and investment on the facilities and formats where the recovery gap is widest.
The timing is commercial. As extended producer responsibility (EPR) frameworks take hold across US states and global markets, fees and penalties are increasingly tied to verifiable recovery performance rather than design intent. Under eco-modulated EPR schemes, what a producer pays is linked to how recoverable its packaging is in practice. Brands that cannot demonstrate real-world recyclability face growing financial exposure.
Measuring how packaging actually behaves inside a recycling facility tells a brand precisely what to adjust so that more of it is correctly sorted and recovered. The same changes that improve recovery also strengthen a brand's position under eco-modulated EPR fees – letting companies act on the evidence now, ahead of those frameworks rather than in response to them.
Colgate-Palmolive joins Kenvue, The Coca-Cola Company, L'Oréal Groupe and Unilever in working with Deepnest by Greyparrot to replace theoretical recyclability with verified recovery data. Across these collaborations, a consistent pattern is emerging: brands that have invested heavily in sustainable packaging design are finding that design intent and recovery reality are not the same thing, and that closing the gap requires data that has not, until now, existed.
Design more circular products with packaging waste intelligence.