Global Commitment Signatories to Miss 2025 Plastic Reduction Goals

A new progress report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation confirms that the 1,000 signatories to its Global Commitment will not meet their 2025 plastic reduction goals.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation recently released its annual New Plastics Economy Global Commitment Progress Report.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation recently released its annual New Plastics Economy Global Commitment Progress Report.

While it may come as no surprise, it’s still disheartening to learn directly from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation itself that the goals set by the 1,000 signatories to its New Plastics Economy Global Commitment to reduce their use of plastic by 2025 “will likely not be met.” In fact, not only will they not meet their goals, in a few areas, companies have increased their use of the material. That’s according to EMF’s 2022 progress report, released in early November 2022.

The Global Commitment is made up of five targets. The first is that 100% of signatories’ packaging will be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025. According to the report, for two consecutive years, brands and retailers have slightly increased their use of reusable, recyclable, and compostable plastic packaging, from 63.2% in 2019 to 65.4% in 2021. Although that number reflects progress, to reach their goals, signatories will need to move the needle 34.6% in just three years—a massive jump from the 2.2% achieved over the previous two.

Another target, to increase the share of post-consumer recycled content across all plastic packaging, was embraced by all signatories, but to different degrees—from 20% to 100%, resulting in an aggregate target of 26%. Here, EMF says, the combined 2025 target remains in reach if efforts are accelerated, given that signatories more than doubled their use of PCR since 2018 from 4.8% to 10%.

Progress on another target, the commitment by brands and retailers to decrease their use of virgin plastic—from 0.5% to 100%, with an aggregate target of 20%—is moving in the wrong direction however. According to the report, following two years of declining virgin plastic use, brand and retail signatories’ aggregated use of virgin plastic has risen 2.5%, returning to 2018 levels of 11.9 million metric tons. While 59% of signatories did report a reduction in their use of the material, some of the largest global packaging users registered an increase. Among them, Mars, Inc. increased its use of virgin plastic by 11% (since 2019), PepsiCo by 5% (since 2020), Mondelez by 4% (since 2020), and The Coca-Cola Company by 3% (since 2019).


Read article   Read related story on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global call for extended producer responsibility for packaging.


“The reason some businesses have not hit peak virgin plastic is due to increases in their total plastic packaging use,” explains EMF. “This reinforces the need for businesses to decouple growth from the use of plastic packaging.”

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