Pew Research on ocean plastic waste and circular economy
Sustainability
July 23, 2020Reading time: 1 minutes
Today the Pew Charitable Trusts, in partnership with SYSTEMIQ, publishes Breaking the Plastic Wave - an extensive study into ocean plastic waste.
Today the Pew Charitable Trusts, in partnership with SYSTEMIQ, publishes Breaking the Plastic Wave - an extensive study into ocean plastic waste.
As a globally recognized industry leader in efforts to address plastic waste leakage, Amcor welcomes this research. We are at the forefront of devising solutions, investing in R&D and we are highly committed to collaborating with NGOs, governments and businesses to collectively improve recycling rates and enhance circularity.
The Global Commitment
There is too much plastic in the environment. That’s why, in 2018, Amcor became the first global packaging company to pledge to make all our packaging 100% recyclable or reusable by 2025. This pledge is part of Amcor’s leading membership of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s Global Commitment, which is a coalition of companies and NGOs committed to accelerating the world’s transition to a circular economy.
Innovation
Amcor believes that innovation is key to building a plastics system that works and to enabling us to meet our 2025 pledge. That’s why we employ thousands of R&D experts to develop innovative packaging solutions; are increasing our use of post-consumer recycled content and collaborating with others to improve consumer education and participation in recycling. Amcor is also investing in advancing both reuse and compostable packaging to address the issue of waste leakage. We will reduce our use of virgin plastics by 200,000 tonnes by 2025. Plastic packaging remains important and much needed–in the battle against food waste, to keep medicines and medical devices clean and to protect people from infections.
Plastic is also highly efficient from an emissions perspective through the supply chain compared to alternatives such as glass and tin. These positive attributes will be enhanced by higher rates of recycling.
In those parts of the world where infrastructure is in place to drive up recycling and drive down leakage, it works. We need to replicate this worldwide and through our partnerships with customers, NGOs, governments and our own innovations, we want to make this a reality.
It is in that spirit that we welcome the Pew Charitable Trusts’ latest research. We look forward to analysing this study to assess how it can inform our own on-going work to create a plastics system that works.
