Giving Compass' Take:

• Pepsico is making an effort to make all of it's packaging recoverable or recyclable by 2025 and created the Recycle Rally initiative that helps students learn how to effectively recover and recycle products. 

• Why is it important for larger companies to prioritize recycling initiatives? 

• Read about other companies initiatives such as Enel that executed an eco-recycling program in Latin America. 

Global consumers now use a million plastic bottles every minute. Though most beverage bottles are made from a readily recyclable type of plastic, less than 10 percent are ultimately recycled—and up to 14 million metric tons of plastic, including discarded beverage bottles, enter the world’s oceans every year.

As our growing addiction to single-use plastic becomes painfully apparent on land and sea, citizens, NGOs and other stakeholders are calling on consumer goods manufacturers to do more to reduce plastic waste.

A move toward a more responsible packaging supply chain is long overdue, but a handful of food and beverage companies are finally putting commitments on the books.

Fellow consumer goods giant PepsiCo aims to make its entire packaging portfolio—which includes things like chip bags, snack bar wrappers and perishable food containers along with beverage bottles—recoverable or recyclable by 2025. It also pledged to forge stakeholder partnerships that will increase packaging recovery and recycling.

On that last point, PepsiCo’s Recycle Rally program looks to engage K-12 students in resource recovery and proper disposal. The company launched Recycle Rally back in 2010 and now engages thousands of students across the country. Almost 4,000 schools have recycled 93 million cans and bottles over the past eight years, and PepsiCo has doled out more than $1 million in prizes and incentives.

In the latest phase of the program, PepsiCo released more than 250 free online resources to help teachers educate their students about recycling. Recycle Rally is part of the company’s broader PepsiCo Recycling program, which includes public awareness campaigns, infrastructure partnerships, and community engagement initiatives.

While NGOs like Greenpeace insist current efforts from major consumer brands are not enough to move the needle on the global plastics problem, it’s encouraging to see these companies finally listening to their customers and making attempts to change—albeit slowly.

Read the full article about companies increasing recycling initiatives by Mary Mazzoni at TriplePundit