Packaging plays an essential role in delivering products to our consumers. Product protection, consumer safety, ease of use, and communication of safety and use information to consumers are just some of the critical functions packaging delivers. As we work to ensure our packaging delivers against key performance criteria, we also seek to drive greater circularity of our packaging at end of life and are working towards 100% recyclable or reusable packaging.
Plastic is one of the materials used in our packaging. Plastic packaging can deliver meaningful benefits in terms of material reductions, product protection, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Plastic waste in our environment is a serious problem, especially when it ends up in our rivers and oceans. It’s a complex global challenge that requires a comprehensive, collaborative approach across the entire plastics lifecycle. Addressing this challenge and driving greater circularity for plastics will require collaboration across multiple stakeholders including industry, governments, civil society, and academics.
At P&G, we take our stewardship obligations for plastics packaging seriously and as we advance our packaging efforts, we are guided by the following principles:
We are guided by science and life cycle thinking – recognizing the need to look at lifecycle impacts of material choices to help inform our design decisions
We are guided by the waste management hierarchy and seek first to reduce, reuse, and recycle as part of our materials management process
Collaboration – we acknowledge that the size and scale of the challenges in front of us will require us to collaborate with others to drive impacts at scale
P&G believes a binding international treaty to address plastic pollution is a needed and an important step to accelerate global progress on plastic pollution. P&G signed the Business Call for a UN Treaty on Plastic Pollution and is pleased that the UN has begun treaty negotiations.
As outlined in the Business Call to Action, we believe the treaty should include:
As negotiations proceed, P&G plans to maintain our focus on driving progress toward our plastic goals, which we believe align with the higher-level objectives of a UN Treaty. These actions include:
For more information on our partnerships around the globe to help reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic, please visit, Mapping our impact | Procter & Gamble (pg.com).
Driving greater circularity in plastic packaging is fundamentally a system challenge that will require collaboration across industry, governments, civil society, and academics. As we advance our efforts, we focus on 5 key areas:
Additional details on efforts to achieve these goals can be found here
Consumers need to have access to collection and recovery systems to enable greater circularity of plastic packaging. In regions of the world that lack adequate waste management systems, we seek to play a role in helping catalyze the development of needed waste management infrastructure. We do this by partnering with others to demonstrate technically and economically feasible approaches that can be scaled by governments, development finance institutions and private equity investment. Key efforts we are supporting include:
Consumer participation is a critical part of driving increased circularity of plastic packaging and we believe we have a role to play in inspiring consumers to recycle. One way we do that is though clear labeling of packaging. In the U.S. and Canada, we have been supporting the use of the How 2 Recycle Label which is a cross-industry platform to provide consumers consistent information on recyclability of packaging.
P&G believes there is a significant opportunity for innovation in plastic separation and recovery technology that can improve both the quantity and quality of recovered plastic. By partnering with others, we believe we can play a role in helping catalyze innovation that will drive greater capability in the plastics recycling industry. Key partnerships and efforts include:
Ensuring robust end markets for recycled materials is a critical component of driving circular systems for plastics. The primary role we play in supporting end markets is using recycled materials in our plastic packaging. Between 2020 – 2022 we nearly doubled our use of recycled resin in plastic packaging (52,800 to 96,469 metric tons) and will increase our use of recycled resin as a key strategy in achieving our goal to reduce our use of virgin petroleum plastic by 50%.
P&G has two key 2030 packaging design goals:
100% of our consumer packaging1 will be designed to be recyclable or reusable:
Reduce our use of virgin petroleum plastic in our consumer packaging by 50%:
1 The scope of this goal includes consumer packaging only, as this is what we believe is most meaningful to drive change in our industry. Shippers and boxes that transport products to our retailers, which are predominantly widely collected and recycled cardboard corrugate, are not included in our tracking.
Fiscal Year 21/22 Data
Resin used in our packaging in FY 21/22
Collaborating with others to help drive impacts at scale is a key part of our overall strategy. Examples of partnerships and programs we support include:
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste
The AEPW is supported by over 70 companies who have committed to invest at least $1.5 billion by 2023 in solutions that stop plastic leakage to the environment.
Holy Grail 2.0
More than 160 companies and organizations from the complete packaging value chain have joined forces with the ambitious goal to assess whether a pioneering digital technology can enable better sorting and higher-quality recycling rates for packaging.
ReSource: Plastic
Under the leadership of WWF, ReSource works with its member companies to maximize, measure, and multiply their impacts on addressing plastic waste.
Circulate Capital Ocean Fund
$100mm investment fund focused on infrastructure needed in SE Asia where lack of capital for waste infrastructure has been a barrier to stopping plastic leakage.
The Recycling Partnership: Film & Flexibles Coalition
The Recycling Partnership: Polypropylene Recycling Coalition
Bioplastics Feedstock Alliance
BFA works to provide thought leadership on the responsible sourcing of bioplastics.
P&G also works to ensure that 100% of our paper packaging is either recycled content or 3rd party certified virgin fiber.