General Mills shareholders have voted to ask the company to report on if and how the company can reduce plastic packaging. | melissamn/Shutterstock
A majority of General Mills investors voted in favor of a proposal asking the company to reduce its use of plastic packaging and issue a report on it.
A number of plastic recycling announcements have been made around the world in recent weeks. | sukiyaki/Shutterstock
From France to Kenya to Thailand, a number of companies are building new facilities, cleaning up waterways and keeping an eye on working conditions. Here’s a roundup of some recent global plastic news.
Berry Global and Mars, Inc. have introduced candy packaging with 15% PCR. | Courtesy of Berry Global
Packaging producer Berry Global and brand owner Mars, Inc. are now putting PCR into plastic containers used for M&M’s and other confection brands.
Thermoforms like those shown here often contain post-consumer material from bottles, but a California bill would require post-consumer thermoforms to be used in production of new thermoforms. | Anakumka/Shutterstock
Current debate over a California bill requiring PET thermoforms to contain RPET derived from thermoforms boils down to one question: What will materials recovery facilities do?
Rick Perez, CEO of Avangard Innovative, a plastics recycling business that joined the second class of Apple’s Impact Accelerator program. | Courtesy of Avangard Innovative
Plastics reclaimer Avangard Innovative was chosen to participate in Apple’s business accelerator program, opening further opportunities for Avangard to do business with the tech behemoth.
A collaboration will bring recycling collection for certain health and beauty products to 25 Walmart stores in four U.S. states. | Chanandra Ramsurrun/Shutterstock
In collaboration with Procter & Gamble and TerraCycle, Walmart is allowing customers in four states to recycle beauty product packaging in certain stores.
A judge determined the key issue was the availability of recycling programs, not whether bottles are made into new items. | Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock
If a bottled water label and cap are effectively unrecyclable, and if statistics show a majority of PET bottles are ultimately wasted, can the containers still be labeled as “100% recyclable”? A federal judge recently said yes.
Recovered plastic end users Unifi and Greystone Logistics reported on increased profits recently. | Warut Chinsai/Shutterstock
Greystone Logistics is installing shredding and pelletizing equipment so it can purchase more lower-cost scrap polyethylene, as opposed to recycled resin. And Unifi is opportunistically buying PET bottle bales while it works to pass feedstock cost increases on to buyers of its recycled polyester.
Novolex reported an increase in weight of post-consumer recycled plastic used in the company’s products for 2021, though the number did not rise as a percentage of total resin used. | a_v_d/Shutterstock
Bag manufacturer Novolex increased the amount of PCR it bought in 2021, but PCR remained just 4% of overall plastic feedstock purchased.
North American consumers will no longer see Sprite in green PET bottles as The Coca-Cola Co. works to increase bottle-to-bottle recycling. | Adnan Zain Kautsar/Shutterstock
To make recycling its bottles easier, Coca-Cola announced it will switch all of its green PET to clear PET in coming months.