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This article appeared in the September 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.
Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo, Mars — one by one, many of the largest consumer goods companies in North America have said in recent months that they simply won’t meet their self-imposed deadlines for increasing recycled content and related goals.
The chorus of unmet expectations has also been consistent in pinning the blame on lagging recycling infrastructure.
“When we first set our goals, we used the best information available at the time to develop a credible but stretching plan,” wrote Pablo Costa, Unilever’s global head of packaging, in a statement this year outlining the company’s progress towards recycling targets. The company’s goals were intentionally ambitious, Costa noted, including an aim to reduce virgin plastic use by half.
“This has proved more challenging than any of us anticipated at the time,” Costa continued. “Assumptions made on the development of new technologies and infrastructure have simply not materialized as they are not fully in our control.”
Other industry watchdogs are less passive in identifying the reason for missed targets.
“Action is not keeping pace with ambition,” stated the Plastic Promises Scorecard, a report co-authored by shareholder activist group As You Sow and environmental consulting firm Ubuntoo.
In analyzing 225 companies for their work on plastic packaging and recyclability, the report found most companies had recyclability, reduction or recycled content goals and that an increasing number of companies supported policies like EPR. But most of those 225 companies “are not on track to meet the goals they have set.”
Companies vary in PCR targets
Brands are facing shortfalls in a variety of target areas. Unilever was one of the first to publicly acknowledge it would probably miss its goals for recyclability, reusability, or compostability, and its virgin plastic reduction goal, for example. On post-consumer resin use, the company is actually doing well: It used 22% recycled plastic in 2023, up from 21% in 2022 and 18% in 2021, and so is on track to meet its 2025 goal of 25%.
PepsiCo has also reported steady increases in PCR use, although it has a long way to go to meet its 50% goal for 2030. The company reported 10% PCR in its plastic packaging in 2023, up from 7% in 2022 and 6% in 2021.
Some companies have made less progress in PCR inclusion. Mars, for example, has a goal to use 30% PCR by 2025 but in 2023 used an average of only 1.5% across its packaging portfolio.
Part of the differing progress comes down to the types of packaging the companies use. Mars uses a great deal of flexible packaging, which doesn’t have the same infrastructure as PET bottles, the company noted, adding in its report, “We are working with governments and NGOs to address this, while also exploring redesign or alternative packaging formats.” Those redesigns could include moving from multilayer to monolayer material, or moving from plastic to paper and compostable packaging.
The U.S. Plastics Pact has taken these material nuances into account when outlining the goals signatory companies will strive for in the next five years.
The pact is one of about a dozen interconnected pacts around the world, which were formed to help plastics stakeholders meet pledges they’ve made under the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative. In 2020, the U.S. pact released a list of four key goals its numerous stakeholders would work toward by 2025. This year, the pact reported on progress and outlined goals for 2030.
On the recycled content front, the pact’s initial 2025 goal was simple and standardized: “Achieve an average of 30% post-consumer recycled content or responsibly sourced biobased content across all plastic packaging.”
By the end of 2022, the average across the pact’s signatories was 9.4%, short of the goal, but the pact’s updated 2030 targets show significant variance by packaging type. The report indicated pact signatories had strategies in place to achieve 25% PCR inclusion in PET, HDPE and PP beverage bottles by 2026 and 60% by 2030. For household cleaning bottles and containers of the same materials, they said they’ll reach 25% by 2028 and 50% by 2030.
For PET and PP thermoforms, pact companies said they’ll hit 20% minimum by 2028 and 40% minimum by 2030. And for commercial secondary film, such as pallet wrap, they said they’ll hit 15% PCR by 2028 and 30% PCR by 2030.
For the flexible materials challenging companies like Mars, the pact did not yet set a goal or target date but instead noted that in the next year, it will develop guidance “for increasing PCR in food-contact packaging, including blow-molded products, injection-molded products, and film that contacts the product.”
Plastic use on the rise
Even as companies deepen their understanding of how to meet recycling goals, one notable trend is brand owners using more plastic even as their goals call for reduction.
Besides its PCR goal, when Mars signed onto the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment the company set targets that 100% of its packaging would be reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 and that it would reduce its use of virgin plastic by 25% by 2025 versus 2019.
The company has actually backslid on virgin reduction, according to its latest sustainability report published on July 24. But as of 2023, 61% of Mars packaging is designed to be recyclable, reusable or compostable, up from 57% in 2022.
“We are making good progress, and we would expect that to continue to accelerate,” the company wrote. “However, the design and infrastructure changes needed are taking longer than we anticipated when we signed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitments, and we are unlikely to fully meet them by the end of 2025.”
On the third point, virgin plastic reduction, the company has moved in the other direction: Against a 2019 baseline of 180,000 metric tons of plastic packaging, Mars used 210,000 metric tons of plastic packaging in 2023, the company reported. And with recycled content totaling 1.5%, or 3,150 metric tons, that suggests Mars used 206,850 metric tons of virgin resin in 2023, which is 15% higher than the 2019 baseline.
Still, Mars reported in the latest sustainability update that it is “investing millions of dollars to improve the recyclability of our packaging, increase the amount of food-safe, recycled content and to reduce the use of virgin plastic.”
Mars is not alone in increasing its plastic use, even as it has targets in mind to reduce material consumption. For example, Amazon recently reported it used 88,698 metric tons of plastic packaging globally in 2023, higher by 3% from 2022. Amazon cited its business growth, reporting a 12% rise in full-year net sales for 2023. Globally, the company delivered nearly 6 billion packages, also higher by about 12% over 2022.
Similarly, despite PepsiCo pledging in 2021 to reduce virgin plastic use by 20% by 2030, the latest report indicates PepsiCo’s virgin resin use has increased by 6% since then.
As You Sow noted this trend in its report: “Despite setting a variety of plastics related goals, for many companies plastic use continues to increase as revenue increases,” the report stated. The report suggests using an alternative metric of “plastic intensity,” which it defines as plastic use per dollar of revenue.
“A laudable number of companies (100) have a goal to reduce use of primary or virgin plastic, yet the focus on reducing virgin plastic, rather than on reducing overall plastic intensity, paints an inaccurate picture of action toward plastic pollution prevention,” the report stated.
Mars is also not alone in investing in the recycling system to improve the conditions that have led to the target shortfalls. Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz and Procter & Gamble are among several steering committees and funders of the PET Recycling Coalition, an initiative of The Recycling Partnership that launched in 2022, for instance.
Over the past two years, the initiative has distributed more than $5 million in grants, resulting in the addition of 29 million pounds per year of recycled PET that previously had not been captured, according to the group’s first annual report. Keurig Dr Pepper and Procter & Gamble are also among the funders of TRP’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition, which takes a similar approach to that material.
Antoinette Smith contributed to this report.