World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

The Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance (BFA) is a collaborative, multi-stakeholder forum of the world’s leading consumer brand companies that focuses on advancing knowledge of bioplastics. WWF convenes the BFA to provide thought leadership on the responsible sourcing of bioplastic, and the role of bioplastic in circular systems. Recognizing the need for a cross-sector approach that brings together several concepts and perspectives, the BFA developed its Vision Statement: Aligning Toward a Circular Bioeconomy.

With plastic pollution threatening natural environments worldwide, leading companies recognize that addressing this crisis is crucial for business continuity, resilience, and social license to operate. However, many organizations struggle to translate ambitious commitments into tangible results.

What is ReSource?

ReSource is WWF's activation hub designed specifically for companies with ambitious plastic waste commitments who want to tap into a powerful corporate community of practice and deliver measurable progress. Acting as a bridge between aspiration and impact, ReSource closes the critical "how" gap in the sustainability journey.

The initiative takes companies through their plastic waste lifecycle journey and helps them explore where in the circular materials system they can make the most meaningful impact. Under WWF's leadership, ReSource brings together industry leaders to collectively address our planet's plastic waste crisis.

Leading companies know that addressing plastic pollution is important for their business continuity, resilience, and license to operate, and it's also the right thing to do. Companies are in many different places on their sustainability journey, and need support on how to act, advocate, and invest towards meaningful, measurable impact.

Annual reporting through ReSource: Plastic, as outlined in this year’s Transparent report, has helped inform many companies’ mitigation strategies, raised their level of ambition, and pushed companies to improve their data collection processes and disclose more accurately and comprehensively.

The major takeaways from the past five years of ReSource: Plastic reporting include:

A couple of years ago, if you drank a bottle of iced tea in Ocean County, New Jersey, it would have been the rare polypropylene item that even had a chance of being recycled. That's because the system was relying on one of the few workers at the county's recycling center to easily recognize and capture polypropylene packaging by hand. The rest—yogurt tubs, takeout containers, and other polypropylene packaging—often ended up at the landfill.

While that scenario is one of a number facilities face, sortation at a facility is only one part of a much larger opportunity for polypropylene recycling. The US generates about two billion pounds of polypropylene waste annually and currently only recycles 8%. Capturing this material requires building out stronger domestic supply chains supported by increased collection and sortation capabilities, and ensuring end markets can repurpose the post-consumer material for use in new products.

At The Recycling Partnership (TRP), we are working to establish and expand such supply chains. The investment needed to do that is large, but so are the prospective returns: Over five years, $17 billion applied to proven recycling solutions would deliver an estimated $30.8 billion in economic benefits that extend over a decade.

Understanding the Scale of Plastic Pollution

By now, most people are aware that plastic pollution has become a crisis, devastating ecosystems and communities around the globe. That’s because the evidence is all around us in plain view – littering roadsides, overflowing from trash cans, and washing up on beaches. However, while we may know that plastic pollution is pervasive, it is hard to fully comprehend the monumental scale of the problem when so much more of it is out of our sight, from the plastic waste we export to developing countries to the plastic floating in remote parts of the ocean or breaking down into microplastics.

If you don’t understand the scale of a problem, how can you effectively take steps to address it? How can you know what is working and what is not? That’s where data collection comes in.

And more specifically, the need to make sure that the data we are using to understand plastic pollution are harmonized across companies, industries, and even countries – otherwise we will never fully comprehend what we are up against or what solutions are most impactful.

It was meant to be the breakthrough moment in the global fight against plastic pollution. After two years of negotiation and countless hours of work from hundreds of people around the world, the UN process to adopt a global treaty against plastic pollution would finally conclude last week. But after a roller coaster of a week, we left disappointed.

In 2019, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and American Beverage (ABA) joined forces to tackle a growing environmental crisis: plastic waste. This partnership is driven by one shared goal: to ensure that every plastic bottle remains in the loop to become another bottle, moving the world towards less plastic use and no plastic in nature. This kind of “circular economy” ensures materials are remade, reducing the need for new plastic and minimizing environmental impact. To that end, over the past five years we’ve worked to deliver meaningful, practical, and innovative solutions — and our efforts have yielded significant results.

Many of the innovations we now take for granted daily consist of single-use plastics, meaning products that can be conveniently disposed of the minute they no longer hold value to the consumer. However, the popularity and ease of the ‘take-make-waste’ economy is not without dire consequences for our planet. In the US alone, it is estimated that the annual volume of plastic waste produced is over 42 million metric tons—only 8.7% of which is recycled. At the current rate, these numbers are set to triple by 2040, since our current waste management system and recycling infrastructure cannot properly manage the volume of virgin plastic produced.

With plastic use ever growing, we need to fix the broken system that has gotten us to this point and prioritize new business models that provide the same functionality and accessibility as single-use plastics without polluting the air, water and soil that both people and wildlife depend on.

As WWF’s head of Plastic Pollution & Business, as well as a material science engineer with a decade of experience in the packaging industry, I often engage with companies about the scope and scale of the plastic pollution crisis – and specifically, what they should be doing about it. While it’s a simple question, it hasn’t always been as simple to answer.

Since its mainstream introduction in the 1940s, plastic has played an important role in shaping our society – helping our food stay fresh, our medical equipment sanitary, and our economy boom with convenient and affordable packaging for consumer products.

Recently however, the production of virgin single-use plastic has exploded, with more plastic products produced in the past 15 years alone than that of the entire 20th century. And while production has rapidly increased, our infrastructure and capacity to effectively deal with the resulting waste have not – leaving 75% of all plastic ever produced to become pollution, harming our environment, communities and even our bodies.

As an individual, I always aim to do my part with mindful consumption and proper disposal of the products I use – but as a sustainability professional, I also know that the only way to really achieve change at scale is for companies to design products and systems that make it easier for us to not create plastic waste in the first place.

Throughout my time at WWF, I've seen firsthand that businesses around the world are ready to step up. As awareness of this issue has risen, so too have corporate efforts to tackle plastic up and down the supply chain. The number of national and voluntary initiatives has increased by 60% in just the last five years. Yet even though many of the largest fast-moving consumer goods companies rank tackling plastic packaging waste as a top sustainability issue, they often don’t know where to begin to deliver the lasting and effective results our planet needs.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve the plastic pollution crisis.

There is overwhelming support around the world to reduce plastic pollution, even among major plastic-production countries. In fact, recent polling shows that 85% of people globally would be in favor of a ban on single-use plastic. Leaders in the business community see a future without plastic pollution and are actively pursuing measures to develop alternatives to petroleum-based plastic. But to sustain these efforts, we need policymakers to develop regulations that ensure a level playing field and deliver greater transparency to minimize supply chain risks.

That’s where the Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution comes in. The fourth negotiating session, or INC-4, begins April 23^rd, and is our last best chance to focus on achieving a successful treaty outcome.

We recently sat down with Erin Simon, WWF’s Vice President and Head of Plastic Waste + Business, to discuss what’s at stake with INC-4, how a global plastics treaty would impact Americans, and what we can all do to support the adoption of a strong, legally-binding agreement.