Veolia partners with group targeting the future of plastics

The New Plastics Economy, a three-year initiative designed to rethink and redesign the future of plastics, has announced that the environmental services group Veolia has been named a core partner. The company, with global headquarters in Paris, will join existing core partners Amcor, MARS and Unilever. The goal of the initiative, led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is to bring together stakeholders from all parts of the circular economy to plastics, starting with packaging, by applying the principles of the circular economy.

The group will use as its template the recommendations of its recently released report The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics.

The report, released earlier this year, highlights several points that need to be addressed, including the reality that there is a material value loss running at $80-120 billion a year in the packaging industry and negative environmental externalities costing at least $40 billion a year – a figure greater than the plastic packaging industry’s profit pool.

The New Plastics Economy initiative focuses on five interlinked and mutually reinforcing building blocks:

• Dialogue mechanism – Bringing together for the first time a group of companies and cities across the global value chain to complete collaborative demonstration projects and inform the other building blocks;
• Global Plastics Protocol – Rethinking plastic packaging materials, formats and after-use systems to provide a common target state to innovate toward to overcome existing fragmentation and to enable the creation of effective markets;
• Innovation moon-shots – Mobilizing targeted innovations that can scale across the system to redefine what’s possible and create the conditions for a new economy;
• Evidence base – Closing critical knowledge gaps by building an economic and scientific evidence base from which to draw insights; and
• Outreach – Engaging a broad set of stakeholders, including citizens, educators, students, policymakers, NGOs and industry associations in the redesign of a better system.

Over the next six months the initiative, which has more than 40 companies and cities, will formalize the New Plastics Economy’s participant group; outline a portfolio for innovation ‘moon-shots’ with potential to scale across the system, building on inputs from two innovation workshops being held in the United States this summer; and facilitation of the first collaborative pioneer projects by participants, which will act as demonstrators that can lead to positive impact at scale.

The next workshop for participants will take place in December 2016.