Nestlé will say goodbye to straws and some plastic bottles by 2025. But hopefully we’ll see a lot more out of the company soon.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.fastcompany.com

You may know that Nestlé is the largest food packaging company in the world. What you may not know is that they are taking some unprecedented and brave steps to drastically cut back on their plastic footprint.

It look likes Nestlé could achieve $90 billion in 2018 revenues. Despite this companies sheer size they are committed to start eliminating plastic straws for their beverage products by as early as February.

The brand Nesquik will move completely from plastic packaging to paper. In addition they are also committed to making 100% of the packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025.

Nestlé have unveiled a institute of packaging sciences in order to make this a goal a reality. Based in Switzerland the institute was opened last December and will start work straight away on new packaging innovations that can be applied to their 2000 brand portfolio,

Did you know Nestlé even make dog chow?

As we have commented on before both changes in the public’s buying patterns and pressure from government is making the big multi national corporations re think their approach to the problem of waste and the solution of recycling.

The issue of plastic recycling itself is interesting because it is not at all feasible to do. Even if a significant amount of plastic recycling could be gathered in one place it is still not profitable for a private recycling company to do.

The solution needs to be a switch from plastic to other methods like foil packaging bags

Nestlé is currently reformulating the majority of plastics that it uses. Those that are considered hard to recycle or cannot be recycled at all will be phased out by the 2025 deadline they have set themselves.
In this group will be 7 different compounds found in their plastic barrier films, side gusset bags trays, lidding, printing inks, ice cream, cones and laminated paper cups.
The biggest challenge however will come from plastic bottles. This is billions of revenue for Nestlé. They run over 100 bottling plants in over 34 countries around the globe.
Its clear Nestlé  needs to start thinking outside the box altogether on plastic packaging.