Progress report says attempts to tackle plastic waste ‘far off track,' robust treaty needed

Global consumer brands and retailers leading a major voluntary initiative to cut plastic pollution are now pushing legally binding measures like a plastics treaty, arguing that efforts to tackle plastic waste are "far off track" and that too many companies are not doing enough.

The voluntary effort, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Global Commitment, on Oct. 31 will release a progress report pointing to actions its members like Coca-Cola and Unilever have taken, such as using more recycled plastic and flattening out or cutting back on the use of virgin resin.

The report walked a fine line between hailing that progress, acknowledging that the EMF initiative is unlikely to meet key 2025 goals and arguing that more robust measures like the plastics treaty are needed for the world to make more progress.

A big problem, it said, is that its members — who collectively put about 20 percent of the world's plastic packaging on the market — are doing more and shouldering more of the burden than the other 80 percent.

A treaty could help level that, companies and EMF officials said. Their call comes as the third of five rounds of treaty talks starts at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme in Kenya Nov. 13.

"There's 20 percent of packaging and plastic represented in the EMF commitment, but 20 percent is not enough to stop plastic pollution," said Allison Lin, global vice president of packaging sustainability at Mars Inc., a member of the EMF initiative, speaking on a recent U.N.-sponsored webinar to build support for the treaty.

"We need mandatory requirements for the rest of the 80 percent to join us so it's not 20 percent bearing the burden, the financial burden for the remaining companies," Lin said.

As one example of how current systems aren't working, EMF projected that 20 trillion pieces of flexible packaging like pouches and sachets will end up in the ocean by 2040 without ambitious policy and regulatory measures, combined with company actions.

"The learnings from the Global Commitment over the past five years have shown it's possible to make meaningful progress towards keeping fossil resources in the ground and plastics out of the ocean," said Sander Defruyt, plastics initiative lead at EMF, in a statement.

"But the world remains far off track from fixing the plastic pollution crisis," he said. "The international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution currently being negotiated, alongside accelerated business action, are now needed … both are crucial to ensure progress is pushed further and faster."

In some areas, EMF pointed to progress.

It said companies have "stabilized" their use of virgin plastics, avoiding nearly 3 million metric tons of virgin plastic production, although that amounts to only a 0.1 percent decrease in the overall use of virgin plastics by its member companies since 2018.

Its best performing brands and retailers cut their use of virgin resin by 13 percent. The global market, overall, saw its virgin resin use increase 11 percent in that time, EMF said.

EMF said that if the rest of the plastics market agreed to its Global Commitment targets, global plastic production would have decreased 10 percent.

"If the entire plastics market had followed the example of the signatory group and stabilized its virgin plastics use at the 2018 level, virgin plastic production would be 10 percent, or 35 million tonnes, lower than it is today," the report said.

As virgin resin use flattened, the report said its companies more than doubled their share of post-consumer content, from 4.7 percent in 2018 to 11.7 percent in 2022.

That compares with 1 percentage point increase in the overall global market's use of recycled plastic, EMF said.

The increased use of recycled plastic, amounting to 1.5 million metric tons a year, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 million tonnes and keeps the equivalent of a barrel of oil in the ground every two seconds, EMF said.

One EMF member company, Belgian recycler Gemini Corp. NV, said the 2025 commitment that EMF firms made to use a weighted average of 26 percent post-consumer content in plastic packaging by 2025 has boosted demand.

"The 2025 recycled content targets created a lot of demand from brands reaching out to us to supply them with recycled materials," said Chairman Surendra Patawari. "However, price remains a significant barrier for many businesses. Therefore we need to see policies that level the playing field between virgin and recycled materials, such as stopping fossil fuel subsidies, pricing the greenhouse gas emissions benefits of recycled materials, and EPR … to fund collection."

EMF said its member companies have outperformed competitors that are not in the global commitment, spending more than $10 billion to try to reach 2025 targets such as cutting back on their use of "problematic" plastics.

Its companies, for example, redesigned packaging to reduce the use of expanded polystyrene packaging by 36 percent from 2020 to 2022, compared with a 3 percent increase in the use of EPS packaging overall in the same period.

Similarly, it said its members decreased their use of PVC packaging 8 percent from 2020 to 2022, while the overall market saw a 3 percent increase.

But the EMF report also pointed to hurdles to overcome, including scaling up reusable packaging, limiting flexible plastic packaging pollution in high-leakage countries and setting up extended producer responsibility programs to build infrastructure for collection, reuse and recycling.

It said progress around reusable packaging has been limited, as companies have conducted a lot of pilots but the overall share of reusable packaging has remained the same.

An official with the United Nations Environment Programme, which jointly issued the report with EMF, said it shows where improvements need to be made.

"In the past five years, the Global Commitment has demonstrated how plastic pollution can be curbed, while shedding light on the 'pain points' that need to be addressed to get the system redesign right," said Sheila Aggarwal-Khan, director of the industry and economy division at UNEP.