2. What is a plastic reduction strategy?

What does a plastic reduction strategy look like?

A plastic reduction strategy is a tool that sets internal goals and commitments for a company to reduce their overall virgin plastic usage over time.

There are five principles of setting a high quality reduction strategy. Strategies must be:

• Informed: Utilize plastic use data to prioritize initiatives that have a significant impact on the reduction of plastic waste.
• Measurable: Focus on clearly defined and quantifiable metrics to enable consistent measurement, reporting, and monitoring.
• Precise: Define goals and milestones for specific products, product lines, activities or processes.
• Comprehensive: Consider the entire value chain and all product categories.
• Timely: Select a clear baseline year and commit to ambitious but achievable targets for reduction.

By following a strategy that was created with each one of these principles in mind, there is huge potential to affect change within your packaging components and materials, and decrease your negative impacts on the environment.

A starting point of any strategy is to create a baseline: calculate how much plastic your business uses (e.g. per year). This allows progress to be tracked. A comprehensive baseline analysis of products’ plastic use can also build your understanding of what SKUs, materials, and polymers are the most impactful to target in your reduction plan. Measuring a baseline and tracking progress helps businesses to report sustainable actions and boosts transparency and trust with stakeholders.

Although reducing virgin plastic is the ultimate goal of a plastic reduction strategy there are lots of different ways this can be achieved. The rest of this pathway will take you through some of these, but they include:

• Direct reduction (e.g. removing plastic from products and packaging completely)
• Reuse (i.e. opportunities for materials to be used more times than before - reducing the need for new, ‘virgin’ plastic to be used)
• Recyclability (e.g. switching to more recyclable materials and reducing virgin plastic inputs).

It is both a challenge and business opportunity to push the status quo. We hope that this pathway is the starting point for you to find ways of preventing waste from being created in the first place, and to give a higher market value to the waste that is created.