PepsiCo announces plastic recycling target

PepsiCo Inc. has announced a plan to use 25 percent recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025.

The Purchase, New York-based beverage and consumer products company says to reach the goal it will be collaborating with suppliers and partners, “helping increase consumer education, fostering cross-industry and public-private partnerships and advocating for improved recycling infrastructure and regulatory reform,” all of which will be needed to allow the company to reach the 25 percent recycled-content level. The goal includes a specific target of achieving a 33 percent recycled-content level for its PET (polyethylene terephthalate) beverage bottles by 2025.

“PepsiCo’s sustainable plastics vision is to build a PepsiCo where plastics need never become waste,” says Mehmood Khan, Pepsi’s vice chairman and chief scientific officer. “We intend to achieve that vision by reducing, recycling and reusing, and reinventing our plastic packaging – and leading global change through partnerships.”

Adds Khan, “Already, PepsiCo is one of the world's largest users of food-grade recycled PET. To further boost recycled content across all plastic packaging and drive progress towards a circular economy for plastics, it is vital to dramatically increase global waste collection and recycling rates through investment in recycling infrastructure and technology.”

Over the past year, PepsiCo says it has taken several measures to support its sustainable plastics vision and related Performance with Purpose 2025 Agenda goals, including:

• In July, the PepsiCo Foundation and The Recycling Partnership announced the launch of “All in on Recycling,” which they call the largest ever industrywide residential recycling challenge to make it easier for 25 million households in the United States to recycle.
• In September, PepsiCo announced it would collaborate in the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), led by the World Economic Forum. That initiative is designed to work with stakeholders in coastal economies, including in Southeast Asia, to show how businesses, communities and governments can redesign their waste management systems to create a circular model.
• Earlier in October 2018, PepsiCo entered into a multiyear supply agreement with Loop Industries to incorporate Loop PET plastic, which is made from 100 percent recycled material, into its product packaging by mid-2020. Loop’s chemical recycling technology is designed to let low-value plastics be diverted, recovered and recycled continuously into new, virgin-quality plastic.