With the support of almost three hundred organizations and signatory companies - including the Coca-Cola Company - the Global New Plastic Economy Commitment was launched in Bali, led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with UN Environment.
It is a Global Agreement to eradicate waste and contamination by plastics from its origin, signed by the world's leading producers, brands, retailers, recyclers and businesses.
The signatories include companies that represent 20% of all plastic containers produced in the world, including consumer companies such as Danone, H & M, Mars, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Unilever, as well as the main producers of packaging such as Amcor and plastics producer Novamont.
The Global Agreement aims to create a new regulation for plastic containers. The objectives will be reviewed every 18 months and will be increasingly ambitious. Companies that sign the commitment will publish annual data on their progress to help drive the initiative and ensure transparency.
The objectives include
- Eliminate unnecessary and problematic plastic containers, and move from single-use containers to reusable packaging models.
- Innovate to ensure that 100% of plastic packaging and packaging can be reused, recycled or composted easily and safely by 2025.
- Circulate the produced plastic. Significantly increase the circulation of plastics that have been reused or recycled and converted into new packaging or products.
The Global Commitment is supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Economic Forum, the Consumer Goods Forum (an organization led by a CEO representing 400 retailers and manufacturers from 70 countries). More than 15 financial institutions also supported the Global Commitment and a fund of more than US $200 million has already been created to generate a circular economy for plastics.
Ellen MacArthur, creator of the Foundation that bears her name, said: "We know that cleaning the plastics of our beaches and oceans is vital, but this does not prevent a plastic tide from entering the oceans every year. We have to move towards the origin. The Global Commitment of the New Plastics Economy draws a line in the field, where companies, governments and others around the world come together behind a clear vision of what we need to create a circular economy for plastics ".
For his part, Erik Solheim, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program, said: "Oceanic plastic is one of the most visible and disturbing examples of a plastic pollution crisis. The Global Agreement of the New Economy of Plastics proposes the most ambitious group of objectives that we have seen so far in the fight to overcome the contamination of plastics. It establishes the steps that companies and governments must take if we want to find a solution rooted in the causes of pollution by plastics, and we urge all those who work to face this global problem to sign it. "
In the last four years, the New Economy of Plastic initiative of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation brought together companies and governments in a positive vision of a circular economy for plastics. Their 2016 and 2017 reports revealed the financial and environmental costs of plastic waste and pollution.
Attentive to this situation, the Coca-Cola Company launched at the beginning of 2018 its global initiative A World without Residues, for which it is committed to recovering and recycling 100% of the containers it puts on the market by 2030.
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