The successor to the groundbreaking UK Plastics Pact will ditch the idea of industry targets in favour of a series of broader 10-year goals, it has emerged.
Following talks with retailers, suppliers and other packaging bodies, Wrap has set out a new mission to shift to a circular packaging system.
Due to be officially launched in April next year, the new UK Packaging Pact will include four goals: optimising packaging, scaling reuse and refill, supporting infrastructure investment, and harmonising data.
Unlike its predecessor, the new agreement will not include specific targets on packaging reduction.
The Plastics Pact’s original targets
The Plastics Pact was launched amid huge fanfare at the height of public debate over plastic, sparked by David Attenborough’s BBC series Blue Planet II in 2018, alongside the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It set out to eliminate unnecessary plastic and ensure 100% of packaging was reusable, recyclable or compostable.
Three of its four 2025 goals have been missed, with only 70% of plastic being reusable or recyclable and only 59% being effectively recycled (compared with a target of 70%). Only 26% is made from recycled content, short of the goal of 30%.
While 99.8% of problematic packaging had been eliminated since the pact was launched, Wrap told retailers, manufacturers and trade bodies at a briefing on the new pact that it had been decided it would not have new targets.
“Feedback from members” included “shifting from targets to goals to make them easier to adapt over 10 years” and “offering flexibility for members to set their own KPIs in support of those goals”.
Wrap is currently finalising founding member sign-ups to the agreement and is planning an announcement of the pact next month, ahead of next year’s launch.
Wrap said its mission was to accelerate the shift to a circular packaging system by “championing material optimisation and traceability, reducing dependence on virgin reuse, scaling reuse models and extending the lifecycle of materials”.
Reuse models
Securing industry backing for a major switch to a reuse model in supermarkets and other retailers has been a key part of negotiations with industry over the new agreement.
In July, major UK supermarkets announced they would work together on a co-ordinated rollout of a reusable packaging model “at scale” by 2030.
A statement signed by nine of the UK’s big food retailers said that while previous trials had been carried out in isolation, the next phase would be to develop standardised packaging across swathes of products to shift the dial in the war on plastic.
That commitment also stops short of any formal target, despite research showing that if retailers switched to a 30% reuse model supermarkets could save tens of millions on EPR fees every year and slash carbon emissions.
The Grocer revealed in November last year that Wrap had said there was a “clear appetite” across the industry to agree on new standardised principles for an “at-scale” rollout of the technology, despite a series of recent setbacks.
However, sources said Wrap had found it “tough going” to secure any major new targets from companies, given the current backdrop of huge geopolitical uncertainty.
In May, the US equivalent of the pact, called the US Plastics Pact, witnessed a mass exodus of some of its most prominent members, including Walmart, Mondelez, Mars, Nestlé and L’Oréal USA, after a fallout over proposed targets.
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