Starbucks, McDonald’s invest $10M in Closed Loop Partners’ NextGen Consortium

Starbucks and McDonalds, the founding members of Closed Loop Partners’ NextGen Consortium, have committed $10 million to continue the consortium’s work in foodservice packaging solutions. Additionally, the Coca-Cola Co. increased its commitment to participate in the consortium as a sector lead partner, and JDE Peet’s, Wendy’s and Yum! Brands will continue to participate as supporting partners.

The consortium plans to use the $10 million to deepen customer research, test reusable packaging systems, explore the circularity of additional packaging materials like polypropylene (PP) and accelerate the development of more widely recyclable and compostable fiber-based packaging solutions. The consortium will also look at infrastructure pathways needed for packaging recovery.

According to a news release on this investment from New York-based Closed Loop Partners, Starbucks and McDonald’s hope that their investment will help to identify, accelerate and scale commercially viable packaging solutions with the investment.

“Over the last three years, the NextGen Consortium has demonstrated that working together as an industry helps accelerate sustainable change and is paving a clear pathway forward for the industry to scale packaging solutions that can benefit the planet and the communities we serve,” says Marion Gross, senior vice president at McDonald’s North America. “Knowing that industrywide collaboration is essential to creating lasting, scalable impact, we invite others to join us in this important work to advance solutions and eliminate packaging waste.”

“Starbucks’ work with the NextGen Consortium has been an important part of our ongoing efforts to reduce single-use cup waste, part of our larger goal to reduce waste sent to landfills by 50 percent by 2030,” says Michael Kobori, chief sustainability officer at Starbucks. “There has never been a more critical time for industry collaboration to shift away from single-use packaging, promote reusability and champion recyclability.”

Closed Loop Partners reports that its NextGen Consortium wants to increase its focus on PP due to growing demand for recycled PP in foodservice packaging and the need to optimize recycling infrastructure to capture the material. In 2020, the NextGen Consortium joined The Recycling Partnership’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition as a steering committee member, collaborating to allocate millions of dollars in grants to recycling facilities to improve PP recycling.

Since 2018, the NextGen Consortium has worked to advance sustainable packaging and recycling infrastructure to help end foodservice packaging waste, initially focusing on redesigning the single-use fiber cups. The group launched the NextGen Cup Challenge, which sourced 480 solutions globally to redesign the cup, selecting 12 winning solutions across three areas, including cup and cup liners, new materials and reusable cup service models. Additionally, the NextGen Consortium’s Circular Business Accelerator supported six teams to help test and refine their solutions.   

In 2019 and 2020, the six Circular Business Accelerator teams executed tests at a large tech company’s campus with four solutions, including two reusable systems, moving to the pilot phase across 14 local, independent cafes in the San Francisco Bay area. The NextGen Consortium also conducted lab and commercial-scale tests to evaluate the performance, recyclability and recoverability of the fiber cup solutions. 

Moving forward, Closed Loop Partners reports that the expanded commitment of the NextGen Consortium will continue to work across the value chain with global brands, municipalities, recyclers and manufacturers to advance viable market solutions that scale throughout the supply chain and bring value to recovery systems.