Big brands clamour to make packaging recycling commitment

Switzerland – The number of leading brands, retailers and packaging companies working towards using 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 or earlier has grown to 11, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

The companies – Amcor, Ecover, evian, L’Oréal, Mars, M&S, PepsiCo, The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, Walmart and Werner & Mertz – are said to represent more than 6 million tonnes of plastic packaging per year.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is leading the New Plastics Economy – a three-year initiative to build momentum towards ‘a plastics system that works’. Applying the principles of the circular economy, it brings together key stakeholders to ‘rethink and redesign’ the future of plastics, starting with packaging.

The project is being conducted in collaboration with, among others, a broad group of leading companies, cities, philanthropists, policy-makers, academics, students and NGOs.

In individual company announcements, Amcor claims to be the first global packaging company pledging to develop all its packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2025 while Danone has confirmed that its iconic evian brand, whose bottles are already 100% recyclable, will make all of its plastic bottles from 100% recycled plastic by 2025.

Ecover has set itself the goal of using 100% recycled plastic in all bottles by 2020 and of introducing recycled content into its caps from 2018.