"Also the industry dynamics are right, right now: Every major brand struggles to meet sustainability goals, partly because it's so hard to buy quality products at scale," he said.Ī snapshot of Circular's "concierge" assistance (Source: Circular) "We focus on plastics first as it's the largest, closest economic and environmental opportunity," Circular founder and CEO Ian Arthur said in an email. Brokering in waste plastics now, the startup has long-term aims to broker in what it called "other environmentally preferred manufacturing inputs." Plastic collectors, manufacturers and both mechanical and chemical recyclers and processors are using it, with a strong response from consumer packaged goods companies, according to Circular. (That is, recycled polyethylene terephthalate, high-density polyethylene, low density polyethylene and polypropylene.) After a year of tests behind the scenes, it opened shop in June with the promise of 10 million pounds of "recycled PET, HDPE, LDPE, and PP in bale, flake and resin to trade" from U.S. Here are more details about the approaches by Circular, Cirplus and Circularise: CircularĬircular is something like an eBay for buyers and sellers of spent plastics. However, among recyclers in the Global Commitment recycled plastics output needs to grow by 27 percent annually between 20 to reach their targets - and by 29 percent annually among plastics producers, according to EMF. Hustling to meet their 2025 deadlines to phase out a variety of levels of virgin plastic, signatories to the commitment pumped up post-consumer recycled material in their packaging by 60 percent between 20, according to EMF.
This will add up to a 19 percent reduction by 2025 from 2018 levels, eliminating the need to produce 40 million barrels of oil for plastics, according to EMF.Ĭhart from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2021 Global Commitment progress report (Source: EMF) Among the organizations setting various targets for 2025 - including Apple, Coca-Cola and Walmart - the adoption of recycled plastics, especially PET for packaging, has accelerated the decline in the use of virgin plastic.īetween 20, the signatories’ virgin plastic use dropped by 1.2 percent. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 businesses, government agencies and organizations representing 20 percent of the market for plastics packaging have signed on since 2018 to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF) Global Commitment to galvanize a circular economy for plastics. Globally it’s just twice that, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which blamed plastics for more than 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Only 4.5 percent of plastic was recycled in the United States in 2018, according to the U.S. They have an uphill climb against the expectation that plastic production will double by 2050, after it already quadrupled in three decades to 460 million metric tons by 2019.
These companies are entering the growing space of firms seeking solutions to strengthen sustainable plastic supply chains and recycling infrastructure. In May the company announced that it is teaming up with plastic producer Neste.
Circularise, founded in 2016 in The Hague, Netherlands, plays a different role, helping buyers and sellers to determine the origins and ingredients of a variety of materials, including recycled and renewable plastics, through its blockchain technology. Cirplus has been doing that since 2018 out of Hamburg, Germany. From the 2021 Google report, " Closing the Plastics Circularity Gap"Īmong a growing number of circularity startups focusing on plastic, three young companies gaining funding and attention are seeking to build some of this infrastructure and help channel more waste plastics into the manufacture of new goods.Ĭircular, launched in June and based in Palo Alto, California, is an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of post-consumer recycled plastic. Chart comparing business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios against circularity goals.
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