Pick up a biscuit wrapper and it feels like one material. It isn't. Most snack and confectionery packs are several thin layers bonded together: a printed outer film, a barrier layer that's often a whisper of aluminium, and an inner sealant layer. Each one does a job. Together they keep the biscuits crisp for months. That same engineering is what makes the wrapper so hard to deal with once it's empty.
Why recyclers turn it away
Conventional plastic recycling works best on a single, clean polymer: a PET bottle, an HDPE can. Multilayer packaging breaks every one of those conditions.
- Mixed materials. The layers melt at different temperatures and don't blend into a useful new plastic.
- They can't be peeled apart. Separating the layers is technically possible but rarely economic.
- Light and dirty. A wrapper weighs a few grams and usually carries food residue, so collecting enough clean material to sell is hard work for little money.
The result is predictable. Waste pickers leave wrappers behind because nobody will buy them, and they end up in landfills, drains, or burned in the open.
Where the rules put it
Under India's EPR framework for plastic packaging, multilayered packaging with at least one layer of plastic and one of another material is Category III. Brands that put it on the market have to show it was collected and processed. That creates a demand for credible processing routes, but only if the processing actually happens.
What we do with it
We stopped trying to turn wrappers back into plastic and started using them as a binder. At our sites the multilayer fraction is pulled out at the sorting line, cleaned, shredded into flakes, blended with aggregate from construction debris and heated so the plastic binds the mix. It's then pressed in a mould and cured.
The product is Plave, a paver with no cement in it. It is M50 grade, absorbs less than 1% water, is fireproof, holds its strength after four hours at 80°C, and has an installed life of 15 to 20 years. At the end of that, it can be recycled again, up to three times.
It took about two years of trials to get there. The part we like most is that it gives the worst plastic in the bin a buyer, and once something has a buyer, it gets collected.
Product figures from the Dump In Bin Pre-Cast Catalog 2025.