Key Insights
Many large consumer product companies are falling short of the plastics recycling targets they set several years ago.
Observers say this failure has contributed to hard times for the companies that process plastic waste into recycled resins.
The regulations requiring the use of recycled plastics may be needed to improve recycling rates, some experts say.
At the end of the last decade, the plastics industry and consumer goods companies came under fire once again for the plastic waste they generated. People were outraged by damning documentaries such as Blue Planet II and scientific estimates that millions of tons of plastics end up in the oceans every year.
To respond to the crisis, the industry dusted off an old standby: recycling.
Promises to recycle more have quelled public outcry in the past. For example, amid a backlash against clamshell fast-food containers in the 1980s, chemical companies responded by building recycling facilities for polystyrene foam. Many of those initiatives later flopped, and plastics recycling rates have remained agonizingly low: around 9% in the US according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s latest survey, in 2018.
When concerns about plastic waste welled up this time, the industry mobilized in concert. Consumer product companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Danone made global commitments to reduce their use of virgin plastics, incorporate more recycled resin, and make plastic packaging simpler and easier to recycle. The initiatives usually had deadlines of 2025 or 2030.
The goals were meant to reassure the public that the world’s largest users of polymers were doing something. The firms also hoped that by setting high marks for themselves, they could make substantial progress after decades of floundering. Their demand for recycled plastics was also supposed to pollinate a new ecosystem of plastic waste collection and recycling.
But as in the past, the results have been disappointing. While companies are using more recycled plastics than before, many are not on track to reach their targets. Blaming market difficulties, some have walked back sustainability targets and extended deadlines.
At the same time, recycling companies are struggling to compete with low-cost virgin materials, and many have closed. To salvage recycling, many experts say that plastics sustainability commitments shouldn’t be voluntary and that government intervention, such as with extended producer-responsibility laws, is necessary.
“The year 2025 was supposed to be the year that plastic recycling would show that it could work. Right?” says Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and plastic waste activist who heads the Last Beach Cleanup, a watchdog group. “That’s what they promised us.”
Missing the target
Every consumer product company has a different story. Those that have fallen short are blaming the shortcomings of the broader recycling system. Others are happy with their progress and say they are on pace.
Colgate-Palmolive, for example, set a 2025 deadline to reduce virgin resin use by 33% from a 2019 baseline and to make its products with at least 25% recycled resin. As of 2024, the company had come close, reducing virgin resin use by 25% and incorporating 21% recycled plastics materials into its packaging. But in its most recent sustainability report, Colgate expressed doubts about the final stretch. “We continue to make significant progress toward our one-third reduction of virgin plastic; however, we face challenges to achieve this target, including the availability, quality and feasibility of recycled content,” it states.
Danone reached 17% and 29% recycled content in packaging overall and for water bottles, respectively, in 2024 against goals of 25% and 50% for 2025. It also rolled out new goals: a reduction in virgin resin use of 30% by 2030 and 50% by 2040 against a 2020 baseline. “Danone has, as the rest of the industry, faced systemic barriers slowing down its progress, from the underdevelopment of collection and recycling infrastructures to the scarcity of recycled materials,” a company spokesperson says in an email. “Achieving circularity requires systemic change across the full plastics value chain.”
A plastics sortation machine at a processing faciity.
Plastics must undergo a complex process of sortation before it can be recycled.
Credit:
Shutterstock
After Coca-Cola reached 28% incorporation of recycled content last year—across all materials, not just plastics—it walked back, or “evolved” as it says, its plastics sustainability targets. Its earlier goal of 50% recycled content in all packaging by 2030 became 35–40% by 2035. In May, PepsiCo sunsetted a goal of reducing virgin resin use by 50% from a 2020 baseline and lowered its target for recycled content from 50% by 2030 to 40% by 2035. “PepsiCo is updating its packaging goals to focus on key markets where it believes its efforts can make the most positive impact and to better account for external factors outside of the company’s control,” the firm says in a news release.
Kelly McBee, circular economy manager for As You Sow, a shareholder activist group that pushes companies to adopt sustainable practices, says she is disappointed by the lack of progress: “With companies reaching the end of 2025 and a lot of these goals for recyclability, for virgin plastic reduction, for recycled content, and the vast majority of company action not keeping pace with ambition, I think we as investor representatives are really asking ourselves: At what point are these company commitments greenwashing? At what point are companies selling a vision for their future that they are not able to implement?”
McBee’s concerns are compounded by the recent failure of countries to sign a global plastics treaty and the Donald J. Trump administration’s disinterest in regulating plastics. “We’re concerned that companies will retreat even from the goals that they have currently,” she says.
“At what point are companies selling a vision for their future that they are not able to implement?”
Kelly McBee, circular economy manager, As You Sow
Colm Jordan, head of advocacy and education at the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) producer and recycler Indorama Ventures, challenges the perception that consumer products companies can’t find the recycled resins they need. In Europe, which mandates 25% recycled plastics content by 2025 and 30% by 2030, companies have overshot their goals. In 2024, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling had 46% recycled content against a goal of 35%; PepsiCo Europe achieved 58% in 2022 against a 50% target for 2030.
“Some brand owners say they struggle to access quality recycled material, but many are already exceeding the legal requirements in place today,” Jordan says.
Not all companies are walking back targets. For example, Procter & Gamble is sticking to its goal of a 50% reduction in virgin plastics use by 2030 from a 2017 baseline. The company had achieved a 21% reduction as of 2024. “We’ve made strong progress by pursuing a multi-faceted strategy that includes lighter packaging, increased use of recycled materials, and increasing use of plastic alternatives,” P&G spokesperson Jennifer Corso says in an email.
And although companies are landing short of recycling targets, they have made substantial gains. For example, Coca-Cola increased its use of recycled PET, used in beverage bottles, by 50% from 2020 to 2024. PepsiCo tripled its use of recycled plastics over that period, to 15%. More broadly, the US PET bottle collection rate hit 33% in 2023, the highest level since the 1990s, according to the National Association of PET Container Resources, an industry group. The incorporation of recycled PET content in bottles reached 16%, a 3% gain from the year before.
“The reality is that there has been a tremendous amount of progress that’s been made in the last 5 years,” says Jonathan Quinn, who heads the US Plastic Pact, an organization made up of plastics suppliers, consumer product companies, and local governments.
Quinn says that such targets are meant to be aspirational and that loftier goals drive more progress than easy ones. “It’s about progress over perfection,” he says.
As to whether the industry loses credibility when it fails to meet goals it set to much fanfare, Quinn points again to that progress. “The seriousness of the industry has been there, has been visible,” he says. “If there is a regression, that’s a challenge of whether the industry was serious. But as long as there’s continued progress, that is what we need to see.”
Moving goalposts
Big consumer product companies have, for the most part, failed to meet their original recycling targets and have either pushed out or relaxed their goals
Coca-Cola
Old goal: 50% recycled content in all packaging by 2030
New goal: 35–40% recycled material in packaging, including 30–35% recycled plastics, by 2035
2020: 12%
2024: 18%
Colgate-Palmolive
Old goal: 25% recycled plastic and a one-third reduction in virgin plastics from a 2019 baseline by 2025
New goal: No change
2020: 10%
2024: 21%
Danone
Old goal: 25% recycled plastic in all packaging and 50% in water bottles by 2025
New goal: A 30% reduction in the use of virgin, fossil fuel–based packaging by 2030 versus 2020 and a 50% reduction by 2040
2020: 10%
2024: 17%
Keurig Dr Pepper
Old goal: 25% recycled plastic and a 20% reduction in virgin plastics from a 2019 baseline by 2025
New goal: 25–35% postconsumer resin by 2035
2020: 2%
2024: 16%
Nestlé
Old goal: 50% recycled PET in all brands and to reduce virgin plastic use by one-third versus 2018 by 2025
New goal: No change
2020: 2%
2024: 15%
PepsiCo
Old goal: 50% recycled plastic and a 50% reduction in virgin plastic from a 2020 baseline, per serving, across food and beverage portfolio by 2030
New goal: 40% or greater recycled content in plastic packaging by 2035. Virgin plastic reduction has been sunsetted.
2020: 5%
2024: 15%
Primo Brands (formerly BlueTriton Brands)
Old goal: 25% recycled PET by 2021 and 50% by 2025
New goal: Beverage packaging to incorporate an average of 50% recycled or renewable material by 2035
2020: 20%
2024: 36%
Procter & Gamble
Old goal: 50% reduction in virgin plastics by 2030 from a 2017 baseline
New goal: No change
2020: 8%
2024: 17%
Unilever
Old goal: 25% recycled plastic by 2025 and a 50% reduction in virgin plastic compared with 2019
New goal: Reduce virgin plastic 30% by 2026 and 40% by 2028 from a 2019 baseline as well as use 25% recycled plastic by 2025
2020: 11%
2024: 21%
Source: Company documents.
Trouble at recyclers
Regression is apparent, however, at the recycling companies that supply consumer product makers. These firms take in bales of plastics from municipalities and sort, shred, and wash them into clean, resalable pellet or flake. Many are struggling and say insufficient demand for their product is partially responsible. Just this year, a PET recycling affiliate of Alpek in North Carolina closed. In California, Evergreen Recycling shut down a recycling line, and another firm, rPlanet Earth, which represented about 4% of US PET recycling capacity, Association of Plastics Recyclers (APR) closed.
“By my count, in the US, more plastic recyclers have shut down than started up 2018 when China banned imports of our plastic waste and 2025,” says Dell of the Last Beach Cleanup. For Dell, rPlanet Earth’s closure was a watershed moment. She points out that California gives financial support to recyclers, has a recycled content mandate, and has long possessed a deposit law that ensures a relatively easy-to-recycle stream of bottles. “All the so-called supporting policy that the recyclers say is needed to make plastic recycling work exists in California. And that puppy still shut down because it could not make money,” she says.
The closure also dismayed APR, which pointed a finger at consumer brands. “Like many U.S. recyclers, rPlanet Earth faced low demand for its products while competing against a surge of low cost imported material and cheap, oversupplied virgin plastic,” the trade group said in a statement in September. “These dynamics are driven by two factors: brands pulling away from recycled content commitments to instead buy more new virgin plastic, and by brands choosing to buy imported rPET to meet their U.S. recycled content requirements instead of buying from US recyclers like rPlanet.”
In an interview with C&EN, Steve Alexander, APR’s president, spreads the blame around. “You’ve got a tsunami of factors that are out there that are basically impacting the recycler’s ability to produce material on a domestic basis,” he says.
Recycling is expensive, Alexander says. “There’s always been a price premium relative to virgin material,” he says. “At some point, you can’t blame the brands for the fact that they have to be cognizant of their price as well and their cost structure.”
In recent years, Chinese companies have built massive amounts of virgin PET capacity, flooding the market and driving down prices. “You’ve got overproduction of virgin material, you’ve got increasing investments by the chemical and plastics manufacturers that far outweigh, in new virgin capacity production across the globe, any investments they’re making in recycling activities,” Alexander says.
And Alexander notes that much of this capacity came online over the past 5 years, after the consumer product companies made their commitments. “I don’t want to give anybody a complete pass on this, but I think that the realities have changed in that period of time,” he says.
Sally Houghton, executive director of the PET Recycling Corporation of California (PRCC), agrees with Alexander that cheap imports are a big reason that business conditions for recyclers have been difficult. PRCC is a nonprofit that buys bales from redemption centers and material recovery facilities and supplies them to recyclers. It also provides other support to California recyclers. Houghton says that the oversupply situation drove the price premium that US-produced recycled resin carries over virgin resin from 5–10% to more than 20%.
But for As You Sow’s McBee, a pledge to incorporate more recycled material implies a willingness to pay higher prices. “The material that is available has a higher cost, certainly, so companies need to back up their commitments with financial action,” she says. For example, she points out that in 2020, Nestlé promised it would be willing to bear up to $1.5 billion in additional costs for recycled materials.
Hard times
Multiple US plastics recycling plants have closed in recent years.
Renovare
West Virginia
Mechanical: Plastics to solid fuel
2022
PreZero US
South Carolina
Mechanical: Polyethylene and polypropylene
2022
Regenyx
Oregon
Chemical: Polystyrene pyrolysis
2024
New Hope Energy
Texas
Chemical: Mixed-plastics pyrolysis
2024
Myplas
Minnesota
Mechanical: Polyethylene film
2024
Omni Polymers
Ohio
Mechanical: Rigid plastic containers
2024
Evergreen Recycling
Californiaa
Mechanical: Polyethylene terephthalate
2025
Alpek
North Carolina
Mechanical: Polyethylene terephthalate
2025
rPlanet Earth
California
Mechanical: Polyethylene terephthalate
2025
a Partial closure.
Sources: The Last Beach Cleanup, C&EN research.
The recycling industry may get some relief from tariffs. Both virgin and recycled PET had been on the Annex II exemption list for the “reciprocal” tariffs (PDF) the Trump administration imposed earlier this year. In September, the administration removed them from the list, and Houghton says prices are already beginning to climb.
But to achieve lasting progress in recycling, tariffs and brand owners’ voluntary commitments won’t cut it, experts say. The industry will need policy that induces greater demand.
Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at the waste management firm Republic Services, says recycling policy has focused on collection and processing. “When we think about maybe 25 years of public policy, primarily all of that regulatory framework has been focused on supply, right?” he says. “How do we recycle more? How do we divert more? There’s been very little in the way of demand focus.”
“If all you’re doing is increasing supply year on year, and not doing anything to develop homegrown end markets, you’re kind of wasting everybody’s time,” Keller says. “No sense producing a product that nobody wants to consume.”
APR’s Alexander says the government should incentivize the use of recycled plastics like it has, at least until recently, alternative energy and electric vehicles. Tax incentives may be a way to induce more demand, he says. Observers have also pointed to recycled content mandates like those that Europe and California have.
Another approach, Alexander and other experts suggest, is extended producer responsibility legislation for packaging. Under such laws, companies that produce packaging are on the hook for payments to support recycling infrastructure, reducing the burden on municipalities. Some laws have ecomodulation provisions that reduce fees for companies that make their packaging recyclable, reduce overall packaging, or incorporate recycled content. To date, Alexander says, eight states have such laws, and laws in other states are coming. “Hopefully those incentives in terms of eco-modulation fees will be successful in driving the utilization of material,” he notes.
Republic’s Keller cautions that the bills passed only recently and are all different from each other. “Nobody’s implemented yet,” he says. “We’ll know in the next 3–5 years what good looks like and what bad looks like.”
McBee, of As You Sow, says companies must do more of their own volition, too. “This is a time for companies to take truly new action towards solving the plastic pollution crisis,” she says. “They can’t be setting goals that they can’t reach. They need to be setting goals that recognize a circularity of plastics, not the same take-make waste model.”
Dell, the environmentalist, is more cynical. To her, the industry has been stalling, waiting for the heat to die down so they can go back to business as usual. It’s a refrain Dell says she’s heard before: “You’ve got to give us 10 more years and then we’ll fix it, right?”
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright ©
2025 American Chemical Society