Major consumer brands are falling well short of their public goals to lower the environmental footprint of their plastics packaging, whether that's using more recycled content, redesigning for recyclability, or expanding reusable and refillable options, a new report says.
The June 12 report from As You Sow came two days after the U.S. Plastics Pact published a similar report pushing back its own deadline for recycling goals to 2030, acknowledging that progress toward its 2025 targets has lagged among its member companies.
The new report ranks 225 global companies like Coca-Cola Co. and SC Johnson across six broad metrics and found many challenges in meeting goals they set for themselves.
Kelly McBee, circular economy manager at AYS, said in a June 12 webinar that over the last decade, many major global brands have set "laudable" targets to make their packaging more sustainable.
"But it's important to note that as we approach 2025, the earliest deadline for many of the first set of these plastic packaging-related goals, companies do not appear to be on track to meet them," she said.
Only 22 of 147 companies, for example, are on schedule to meet their recyclability goals because the packaging they're using isn't recyclable in practice in U.S. cities, the report said.
As well, the AYS report, "2024 Plastic Promises Scorecard," faulted companies for not doing enough to reduce overall plastics use, saying manufacturers were instead replacing virgin plastics with recycled materials.
That was also a theme in the new U.S. Plastics Pact goals unveiled this week. It set an overall 30 percent virgin plastics use reduction target for the first time for its members, which include many of the same global firms ranked in the AYS scorecard.
The AYS report also pointed to a lack of recycled materials to meet demand for recycled content and called for more bottle bills to bring in materials.
It said only 43 companies had pilot projects for reusable packaging and called on global brands to do more to commercialize that work.
Venky Kini, a co-author of the AYS report and a founder of environmental platform Ubuntoo, said 45 of the 225 companies have explicit recycled-content goals and that some are discussing ways to certify such material.
"Our recommendation is to prioritize post-consumer over post-industrial content," said Kini, a former president of Coca-Cola India. "There is a lot of evidence to show that container deposit schemes tend to improve recycled-content availability, which is the single biggest obstacle for companies to get access to recycled material."
He said the report also evaluated the "plastics intensity" of a company's packaging, as well as stances on extended producer responsibility legislation.
McBee said only nine of the 225 companies received a "B" grade in the report — among them, Coca-Cola, Keurig Dr Pepper and SC Johnson — and none received an "A" grade.
Some plastic packaging makers like Alpla Group and Berry Global were also ranked. Alpla received a "C" and Berry a "C-," but they were among the top-ranked packaging companies.
The AYS webinar also included a speaker from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which oversees a global network of 11 plastics pacts that includes companies it says collectively use 20 percent of the world's plastic packaging.
EMF released a report in late 2023 looking at the first five years of the global pacts and found that while progress was made, voluntary initiatives like its own needed to be backed up with legal measures like the global plastics treaty to bring all companies under the same rules.
On the AYS webinar, Aisha Stenning, program manager for EMF's global commitment on plastics, said companies in the pacts were able to stabilize their virgin plastics use since 2018, reduce problematic plastic packaging applications and more than double their use of recycled plastic.
But she said EMF also identified areas that need more work, such as bringing reusable packaging from the niche uses it has now to commercial scale. If that were done, she said, then it could reduce virgin plastic used in packaging by 20 percent by 2040.
She said flexible packaging may be the biggest hurdle to meeting the EMF's voluntary goals.
"Flexible plastic packaging such as sachets, wrappers and pouches are some of the fastest-growing types of plastic packaging," Stenning said. "But they're also the most challenging from a waste and pollution perspective. …They're a key reason why it looks like we're going to miss the 100 percent recyclability, reusability and compostability goal."