Nestlé (Vevey / Switzerland; www.nestle.com) aims to make all of its packaging recyclable or re-usable by 2025, the food and beverage giant said. The move comes as companies tackle the issue of waste amidst criticism that packaging goods across the world end up with millions of tonnes of plastics waste in landfills and in the oceans.

Similar announcements have been made by other multinationals such as Coca-Cola (see Plasteurope.com of 19.03.2018), Evian (see Plasteurope.com of 23.01.2018) and Unilever (see Plasteurope.com of 26.01.2017). This comes about with the EU poised to adopt far-reaching directives on packaging, including one that would require 55% of municipal solid waste to be recycled by 2025, 60% by 2030 and 65% by 2035 in individual member states (see Plasteurope.com of 13.03.2018).

Nestlé said to meet its 2025 target, it would discard non-recyclable plastics and encourage the use of plastics that allow better recycling rates. Complex combinations of packaging material such as paper/plastics will be eliminated or changed.

The Swiss company is working to increase the proportion of recycled plastic it uses in packaging and has a commitment to use 25% recycled PET in bottles across Europe by 2025. Nestlé said it is on track to reach its goal of cutting the amount of packaging by 140,000 t by 2020 from 2015. By the end of 2017, it had eliminated more than 100,000 t of packaging materials from production processes. Some 22,558 t of packaging had been avoided since 2015, saving CHF 29.3m (EUR 35m), it said.

Nestlé said it will develop a well-functioning collection, sorting and recycling schemes in countries where it operates and will provide recycling information on plastic product labels. It launched a global campaign for its “Pure Life” bottled water in 2017, which aimed to improve collection rates of recyclable plastic (see Plasteurope.com of 16.08.2017).

In addition to changing its packaging, Nestlé is also working with other industry players to develop environment-friendly packaging. Nestlé Waters (Paris / France; www.nestle-waters.com), Danone (Paris; www.danone.com) and Origin Materials (Sacramento, California /USA; www.originmaterials.com) co-founded the “NaturALL Bottle Alliance” to scale-up production of PET using bio-sourced feedstocks (see Plasteurope.com of 24.03.2017).