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PepsiCo Announces New Packaging Goal For 25% Recycled Plastic Content By 2025

As part of its sustainable plastics vision, PepsiCo, Inc. (PepsiCo) today announced a new goal to strive to use 25 percent recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025.

PepsiCo aims to achieve this goal by collaborating with suppliers and partners, helping to increase consumer education, fostering cross-industry and public-private partnerships, and advocating for improved recycling infrastructure and regulatory reform, all of which are required to realize our ambition. The goal includes an aim specific to PET (polyethylene terephthalate) beverage bottles to achieve 33% recycled PET content by 2025.

Published 6 years ago | About a 2 minute read

As part of its sustainable plastics vision, PepsiCo, Inc. (PepsiCo) today announced a new goal to strive to use 25 percent recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025.

"PepsiCo's sustainable plastics vision is to build a PepsiCo where plastics need never become waste. We intend to achieve that vision by reducing, recycling and reusing, and reinventing our plastic packaging – and leading global change through partnerships," commented Dr. Mehmood Khan, Vice Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at PepsiCo. "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."

PepsiCo's new goal builds on goals announced in 2016 under the company's Performance with Purpose 2025 Agenda. The 2025 Agenda included goals for PepsiCo to strive to design 100% of its packaging to be recyclable, compostable or biodegradable; to increase its use of recycled materials; to reduce the carbon impact of its packaging and, in partnership with the PepsiCo Foundation, to work to increase recycling rates.

PepsiCo has made a number of recent announcements in support of its sustainable plastics vision and related Performance with Purpose 2025 Agenda goals. These include:

Earlier in October 2018, PepsiCo entered into a multi-year supply agreement with Loop Industries to incorporate Loop PET plastic, which is 100 percent recycled material, into its product packaging by mid-2020. Loop's transformational chemical recycling technology allows for low value plastics to be diverted, recovered and recycled continuously into new, virgin-quality plastic.
In September 2018, PepsiCo announced it would collaborate in the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), led by the World Economic Forum, which will work with stakeholders in coastal economies, including in South East Asia, to show how businesses, communities and governments can redesign their waste management systems to create a circular model.
In July 2018, The PepsiCo Foundation and nonprofit, The Recycling Partnership, announced the launch of "All in on Recycling," the largest ever industry-wide residential recycling challenge to make it easier for 25 million families across the US to recycle.