Nestlé aims to make all its packaging recyclable or re-usable by 2025

Large companies have been known to have a huge amount of social and environmental responsibility, ranging from increasing public health to limiting plastic waste. Nestlé is using its power as a multinational food and drinks company to further advance recycling in the packaging industry. It aims to make all of its packaging recyclable or re-usable by 2025 to prevent it from ending up in landfill or as litter.

This will be achieved by focusing particularly on eliminating non-recyclable plastics, encouraging the use of plastics that allow better recycling rates and changing complex combinations of packaging materials.

The company has highlighted the importance of a circular economy and is striving to help develop one with a number of commitments to develop its own schemes and collaborate with others. Nestlé will help create a larger market for recycled plastics by increasing the proportion of recycled plastics in its packaging, and make recycling information more readily available for customers via labels on its packaging. It will also play an active role in the development of well-functioning collection, sorting and recycling schemes across the countries it operates in, and work with value chain partners and industry associations on packaging solutions that reduce plastic usage and facilitate recycling.

This follows several other global efforts to reduce packaging waste: the EU announced it plans to make all plastic packaging across Europe recyclable or re-usable by 2030; Iceland supermarkets similarly vowed to eliminate plastic packaging for its own brand products within five years; and Unilever has partnered with Indorama Ventures and start-up company Ioniqa to convert PET waste into transparent virgin-grade material.

Nestlé also previously had a number of strategies in place to improve the environmental performance of its packaging. Efforts to minimise the amount of packaging it uses have been successful so far, the company stated on its website.

“Through our eco-design process, we are on track to reach our objective to avoid 140,000 tonnes of packaging materials by 2020, versus 2015. By the end of 2017, we had eliminated more than 100,000 tonnes of packaging materials from our production processes.”

Nestlé CEO Mark Schneider explained, “Plastic waste is one of the biggest sustainability issues the world is facing today. Tackling it requires a collective approach. We are committed to finding improved solutions to reduce, re-use and recycle. Our ambition is to achieve 100% recyclable or re-usable packaging by 2025.”

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