According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s new Global Pledge progress report, global use of “virgin plastic” (new type of plastic that has not been recycled) has peaked and is expected to decrease significantly by 2025 thanks to the increase of recycled packaging.
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation is a UK-based charity that focuses on the “circular economy” of sources such as recycled plastic and promoting reuse for as long as possible.
According to Ellen Macarthur’s most recent report, globally committed brands and retailers, including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mars and L’Oréal, have reduced their plastic waste by 1.2%. their birth rates between 2019 and 2020, after a slight decrease of 0.6%.
Sander Defruyt, head of the organization’s new New Plastics Economy initiative, said: “If you put it in a historical perspective, the industry’s use of virgin plastics has increased quite rapidly over the past several decades. Some of the biggest brands and retailers in the world are showing a move. reduce virgin plastic and demonstrate that economic growth can be decoupled from the use of virgin plastic.”
Progress in reducing virgin plastic has been largely driven by an increase in packaging recycling. However, because the amount of discarded plastic packaging is a huge number and can exist in the ground and under the ocean for hundreds of years, the problem of plastic waste is still something very difficult.
Furthermore, less than 2% of the signatories’ plastic packaging is reusable, and more than half of the signatories have achieved no percentage of reusable plastic packaging.
While Unilever has increased its recycled bag content to 11% by 2020 and is on track to hit its target of 25% by 2025, other retailers such as Mars say they are not yet ready to use recycled plastic packaging. production in 2020, although the goal is to reduce plastic packaging by 30% by 2025.
One of the leaders in reducing virgin plastic is Coca Cola with 11.5% recycled plastic packaging in 2020, up from 4% in 2019 and 2% in 2018.
A Coca-Cola spokesperson said: “We appreciate the leadership of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in advancing the goal-setting and more consistent reporting of the circular economy. While we are proud of the progress we’ve made, we appreciate the leadership of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. has achieved since launching World Without Waste in 2018 but there is more we can do and we look forward to engaging with our stakeholders even more.”
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation hopes that if other major retailers follow suit, overall virgin plastic usage could drop by 19% by 2025.
Refer to Earth
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