UK-based consumer goods maker Unilever has made a commitment to ensure usage of 100% recyclable plastic packaging by 2025.
Besides ensuring all of its plastic packaging is designed to be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable, the firm intends to help create a plastics protocol to encourage circular economy for plastic packaging in the consumer goods industry.
Only 14% of the global plastic packaging is being recycled, while 40% ends up in landfill and a third in fragile ecosystems, according to Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), an economic research group working with Unilever.
Ellen MacArthur said: "Combining upstream measures on design and materials with post-use strategies demonstrates the system-wide approach that is required to turn the New Plastics Economy into reality."
Earlier, Unilever has committed to reduce the weight of its packaging by one third by 2020 while increasing the use of recycled plastic content in its packaging to at least 25% by 2025. The commitments are part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.
Unilever CEO Paul Polman said: “Yet it is clear that if we want to continue to reap the benefits of this versatile material, we need to do much more as an industry to help ensure it is managed responsibly and efficiently post consumer-use.
“To address the challenge of ocean plastic waste we need to work on systemic solutions - ones which stop plastics entering our waterways in the first place.
“We also need to work in partnership with governments and other stakeholders to support the development and scaling up of collection and reprocessing infrastructure which is so critical in the transition towards a circular economy. Ultimately, we want all of the industry’s plastic packaging to be fully circular.”
Unilever said it reached its goal of ending non-hazardous waste to landfill across its manufacturing operations in 2015.
