Closed Loop Partners Helps Launch U.S. Plastics Pact Roadmap to 2025, Driving a National Strategy to Achieve Circular Economy Goals

New York, NY – Today, Closed Loop Partners helped launch The U.S. Plastics Pact’s (“U.S. Pact”) “Roadmap to 2025,” an aggressive national strategy illustrating how the U.S. Pact, Closed Loop Partners and fellow signatories will achieve each of the U.S. Pact’s four 2025 targets through specific actions, responsibilities, and interim timeframes to realize a circular economy for plastics in the United States by 2025. Closed Loop Partners is proud to join the U.S. Plastics Pact’s Advisory Council as a Standing Investment & Innovation Advisor.

Launched in August 2020, The U.S. Plastics Pact is a consortium led by The Recycling Partnership and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global Plastics Pact network, which unites a holistic ecosystem of cross-industry stakeholders behind a common vision and national strategy to address plastic waste at its source by 2025.

“With global plastics demand set to triple by 2050, there is a critical need to develop a circular system for plastics––prioritizing scaling reuse and refill models, reducing material usage in design, while bolstering recovery infrastructure to keep valuable materials within supply chains at their highest value, for as long as possible,” says Kate Daly, Managing Director of the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners. “Closed Loop Partners is proud to be part of this collaboration with many industry leaders, which complements our existing investments, pilots and projects related to addressing plastics waste. We look forward to continuing the work needed to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, and a zero-waste future in the United States and beyond.”

Closed Loop Partners joins other stakeholders across the plastics value chain in achieving systemic change and accelerating progress toward the following 2025 targets by inspiring and supporting upstream innovation through coordinated initiatives such as rethinking products, packaging, and business models in order to transition away from today’s take-make-waste model to a circular economy where plastics never become waste:

1. Define a list of packaging to be designated as problematic or unnecessary by 2021 and take measures to eliminate them by 2025.
2. 100% of plastic packaging will be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.
3. By 2025, undertake ambitious actions to effectively recycle or compost 50% of plastic packaging.
4. By 2025, the average recycled content or responsibly sourced bio-based content in plastic packaging will be 30%.

Over the last seven years, Closed Loop Partners has researched, tested and invested across various solutions to address plastics waste, focusing on both upstream and downstream strategies, all of which are needed to address the diversity and volume of plastics in our economy. The firm’s Advancing Circular Systems for Plastics & Packaging Initiative explores the latest recycling technologies that can complement and grow existing recycling infrastructure, as well as reuse and refill systems, to help reduce the need for virgin plastics and extend the lifespan of products, so that plastics can be continually reused or transformed, never reaching landfill.

The U.S. Pact’s Roadmap is designed to kick-start action and help U.S. industry leaders and packaging producers develop a national strategy, advance shared goals, and measure the strength of progress through annual reporting. This national strategy will assist Pact Activators in reaching ambitious goals by 2025 that they could not otherwise meet on their own through sharing knowledge, optimizing investments, identifying gaps, overcoming systemic barriers, and implementing policies.

“The current state of U.S. infrastructure, coupled with the lack of incentives to utilize recycled content in plastic packaging, have put immense strain on the value chain,” said Emily Tipaldo, Executive Director, The U.S. Plastics Pact. “The Roadmap is designed to help U.S. industry leaders act on the significant, systemwide change needed to realize a circular economy for plastics by 2025. The timeframe is short, and the workload is immense, but if we choose to do nothing, the visions of a circular economy across the U.S. will give way to the status quo. We look forward to working with all our Activators to drive this critical change.”

The Roadmap holds Activators of the U.S. Pact accountable to sustainability objectives by creating the pathway in which companies, governments, and NGOs can successfully ensure that plastics remain in the U.S. economy and out of the environment for years to come.

To read the U.S. Pact’s full Roadmap, please visit here.

About Closed Loop Partners

Closed Loop Partners is a New York based investment firm comprised of venture capital, growth equity, private equity, project-based finance and an innovation center focused on building the circular economy. The firm’s innovation center––the Center for the Circular Economy––unites competitors to tackle complex material challenges and to implement systemic, circular solutions. Adept at navigating every step in the value chain, Closed Loop Partners brings together designers, manufacturers, recovery systems operators, trade organizations, municipalities, policymakers and NGOs to create scalable innovations that target big system challenges.

About The Recycling Partnership

The Recycling Partnership is the action agent transforming the U.S. residential recycling system for good. Our team operates at every level of the recycling value chain and works on the ground with thousands of communities to transform underperforming recycling programs and tackle circular economy challenges. As the leading organization in the country that engages the full recycling supply chain, from working with companies to make their packaging more circular and help them meet climate and sustainability goals, to working with government to develop policy solutions to address the systemic needs of the U.S. recycling system, The Recycling Partnership positively impacts recycling at every step in the process. Since 2014, the nonprofit change agent diverted 375 million pounds of new recyclables from landfills, saved 968 million gallons of water, avoided more than 420,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, and drove significant reductions in targeted contamination rates. Learn more at recyclingpartnership.org

About World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

WWF is one of the world’s leading conservation organizations, working in nearly 100 countries for over half a century to help people and nature thrive. With the support of more than 5 million members worldwide, WWF is dedicated to delivering science-based solutions to preserve the diversity and abundance of life on Earth, halt the degradation of the environment and combat the climate crisis. Visit www.worldwildlife.org learn more and keep up with the latest sustainability news by following @WWFBetterBiz on Twitter and signing up for our newsletter and news alerts here.

About the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global Plastics Pact Network

Since 2016, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative has rallied businesses and governments behind a positive vision of a circular economy for plastic. Its 2016 and 2017 New Plastics Economy reports captured worldwide headlines, revealing the financial and environmental costs of waste plastic and pollution.