Mars, working with SABIC and Huhtamaki, will include food-grade recycled plastic in packaging of pet food brands in 2021. The company has plans to expand to other brands in the next year. This important step helps accelerate Mars’ progress towards achieving 30% recycled content and 25% less virgin plastic by 2025. Mars, Incorporated announced it will incorporate recycled polypropylene plastic into the primary packaging for some of its popular pet food brands. This will reduce virgin plastics use across its packaging portfolio, to build a circular economy where no packaging becomes waste.
Through its partnership with global packaging supplier Huhtamaki and petrochemical leader SABIC, Mars will use recycled plastic which has been manufactured using an advanced recycling process for its pet food packs. Thanks to this process, the packs will not feel or be different from those made with traditional virgin plastic, but will have the added benefits that they include recycled material coming from previously used plastic products.
The recycling approach used by SABIC to make its certified circular polypropylene is one of the few solutions currently available that is able to take mixed, used plastic that is otherwise hard to recycle via traditional recycling routes, and to transform them back into plastic suitable for new food-grade recycled packaging.
The recycled material is certified under the ISCC PLUS (Institute of Sustainability & Carbon Certification) scheme that uses a “mass balance” approach. This widely recognized international sustainability certification scheme verifies the quality and authenticity of the recycled material along the supply chain from feedstock to final product.
The partnership comes as part of Mars’ Sustainable Packaging Plan and ambitions to use 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2030.
Using advanced recycling technology will be an instrumental part to achieving use of 30% recycled plastics and to reduce virgin plastic use by 25%.
Mark Vester, Global Circular Economy Leader at SABIC, said: “At SABIC we are committed to developing new solutions to meet our customers’ demands for increasingly sustainable solutions.
SABIC’s certified circular products from TRUCIRCLE™ portfolio offer a carbon footprint reduction of 2kgs of CO2 for every kilogram of polymer produced diverted from incineration.
Only through partnerships such as this can we prove the commercial viability and sustainability contribution of advanced recycling processes to help confront the challenges our society is facing today.”
This work is part of Mars’ mission and responsibility to help create a healthy planet on which all people can thrive – a belief that’s at the heart of the Mars’ $1 billion Sustainable in a Generation Plan.
For further information on Mars’ approach to sustainable packaging, visit https://www.mars.com/sustainability-plan/healthy-planet/sustainable-packaging.
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