From Aldi to Keep Cup: Dozens of businesses sign deal to reduce plastic waste by 2025

A group of major Australian businesses from Aldi to Keep Cup have united to make a bold commitment against using plastic in their supply chains.

Major retailers including Coles and Woolworths have signed on to the ANZPAC plastics pact alongside other industry players such as Aldi, The Arnott’s Group and Nestle Australia to commit to reduce their plastic use by 2025.

Joining these industry behemoths are NGOs such as Clean Up Australia and Planet Ark Environmental Group, as well as the world’s first reusable coffee cup brand Keep Cup.

The businesses and organisations have signed the pact to show their commitment to preventing plastic waste from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific from going to landfill and the ocean.

To do this, signatories pledge to reach four targets by 2050, including:

• Eliminating unnecessary packaging through innovation;
• Making 100% of packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable;
• Increasing the amount of plastic packaging collected and recycled by 25%;
• Ensuring there is 25% of recycled content in all packaging.

Brooke Donnelly, chief executive of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, said plastic use is a growing problem that is also fundamentally an international one.

“To tackle plastic waste effectively we need to find solutions that aren’t constrained by national borders or old ways of thinking,” she said.

Donnelly said plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental issues facing the planet.

“By 2040, if we fail to act, the volume of plastic on the market will double, the annual volume of plastic entering the ocean will almost triple, and ocean plastic stocks will quadruple,” she said.

The pact, which has taken three years to be finalised, works alongside the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global Plastics Pact Network.

The Plastics Pact Network is a globally coordinated response to waste and pollution that unites over 550 member organisations behind the goal of creating a circular economy for plastic.

These ambitious cross-regional initiatives aim to transform how businesses use plastics by eliminating unessential plastics, ensuring that the any used are reusable, and circulating any that is used to keep it out of the environment.