Recycling body announces addition of PepsiCo as its latest funding partner

By Paul Ploumis

SPOKANE (Scrap Monster): Falls Church, Virginia-headquartered national non-profit, The Recycling Partnership, has announced addition of PepsiCo as its latest funding partner. The recycling body’s collaboration with global food and beverages giant is aimed at boosting recycling rates across the US. Incidentally, the US has been reporting continuous decline in recycling rates when compared with other regions of the world.

According to Roberta Barbieri, Vice President, Global Water and Environmental Solutions at PepsiCo, the company’s association with the Recycling Partnership is focused on making collective investment in local recycling infrastructure and education to bring effective transformation in recycling habits of communities. The partnership is the latest in a series of initiatives that the company has undertaken to reduce packaging waste. In March this year, it had entered into an agreement with Danimer Scientific on development of biodegradable film resins for thin film packaging. Later in May, it had joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation-led New Plastics Economy (NPE) initiative as a Core Partner in building more sustainable global plastics value chain.

The company noted that it has made remarkable progress in its efforts to cut packaging waste from its products by removing nearly 100 million pounds of packaging in 2015 alone. Also PepsiCo’s total use of recycled PET totaled nearly 140 million pounds during the year.

Keefe Harrison, CEO for The Recycling Partnership noted that the organization is pleased to welcome PepsiCo as a partner. The association with a leading company like PepsiCo will help to boost recycling and raise awareness on the importance of recycling. Investment in recycling has proved to deliver significant reduction in greenhouse gases and water use and notable progress to communities, Harrison added.

A study conducted under the leadership of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) during late 2015 and early 2016 had shown that the US households capture only less than half of recyclables. According to the study, 73% of the US population had access to curbside recycling, out of which 53% enjoyed automatic recycling provided at homes. Meantime, 6% of US residents had no recycling programs available. Further, drop-off recycling programs are available to 64% of the US population, the study found.

As per statistics released by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the country’s recycling rate had increased slightly from 34.3% in 2013 to 34.6% in 2014. The recycling and composting rate had witnessed marginal rise of 2.2% over the previous year.