Food manufacturing group Nestlé (Vevey / Switzerland; www.nestle.com) is beefing up its commitment to cease using unrecyclable or hard-to-recycle plastics in its packaging by 2025. The company is already a member of the “STOP” project – see Plasteurope.com of 19.10.2017 – and the first food company to join the scheme to help large population areas such as cities boost waste recycling and prevention set up by Borealis (Vienna / Austria; www.borealisgroup.com) and environmental support group Systemiq (London / UK; www.systemiq.earth) in 2017. Since then, other partners include the Norwegian government, Nova Chemicals, Borouge and Veolia. The first partnership in the STOP project was with Muncar, a fishing port in the Indonesian province of East Java, which has no effective waste management system and is overwhelmed with plastics waste in the port and on the beaches.

Nestlé has also announced initiatives to drive out the use of plastics in its packaging, including from next month eliminating all plastic straws from its products. It will instead use alternative materials, including paper. The firm also said it will start rolling out paper packaging for its “Nesquik” drink product in the first quarter of 2019. In addition, the brightly-coloured caps for tubes of its world-famous “Smarties” chocolate sweets will be plastic-free from later this year.

The group said its Nestlé Waters (Paris / France; www.nestle-waters.com) operation will bump up the recycled PET content in its bottles to 35% by 2025 at a global level, while it will reach 50% in the US – see Plasteurope.com of 18.12.2018 – with a focus on its brand “Poland Spring”. It will also increase the rPET content for its European bottled water brands “Acqua Panna”, “Buxton”, “Henniez” and “Levissima” to 50% by 2025.

The latest moves follow Nestlé’s announcement in April last year that it would seek to make all of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025 – see Plasteurope.com of 18.04.2018. Nestlé chief executive Mark Schneider said while his company was committed to pursuing recycling options where feasible, 100% recyclability was not enough to tackle the plastics waste crisis.

Schneider said his company was “determined to look at every option to solve this complex challenge and embrace multiple solutions that can have an impact now. We believe in the value of recyclable and compostable paper-based materials and biodegradable polymers, in particular where recycling infrastructure does not exist.”

Nestlé also announced it had formed a partnership with Danimer Scientific (Bainbridge, Georgia / USA; www.danimerscientific.com), a manufacturer of bioplastic products – see Plasteurope.com of 15.10.2018 – to develop biodegradable bottles. The pair will work together to design and produce bio-based resins for Nestlé’s bottled water business using Danimer Scientific’s “Nodax” PHA.

The Swiss group has also partnered with PureCycle Technologies (www.purecycle.com) to develop food-grade recycled polypropylene. PureCycle is building a large rPP plant in Lawrence County, Ohio / USA, set to start operations by 2020. Nestlé competitor Procter & Gamble (P&G, Cincinnati, Ohio / USA; www.pg.com) is also a partner of Pure Technologies – see Plasteurope.com of 09.08.2017.

Looking ahead to "World Oceans Day" on 8 June 2019, Nestlé is planning to organise its employees to participate in a global waste collection initiative, in a move to target plastics waste. Nestlé’s 4,200 sites across the world are also committed to eliminating single-use plastic items that cannot be recycled. The company will ensure that recyclable materials such as PET and aluminium will have the proper means to be collected where consumed.