(April 20,2022) – Today, Nexus Circular has joined the U.S. Plastics Pact, a collaborative, solutions-driven organization rooted in four ambitious goals intended to drive significant systems change by unifying diverse cross-sector approaches, setting a national strategy, and creating scalable solutions to create a path forward toward a circular economy for plastics in the United States by 2025. The first North American Pact of its kind, the U.S. Pact is a consortium founded by The Recycling Partnership and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Plastics Pact Network.
As part of the U.S. Pact, Activators like Nexus Circular recognizes that significant, systemwide change is imperative to realize a circular economy for plastics. As such, the U.S. Pact is convening more than 110 businesses, retailers, not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, and research institutions across the plastics value chain to bring one voice to U.S. packaging through coordinated initiatives and innovative solutions for rethinking products, packaging, and business models.
Eric Hartz, President and Co-Founder of Nexus confirms, “Nexus has developed a commercial advanced recycling solution that is economically viable and now scaling worldwide to address the accumulation of plastics in the environment. As an Activator of the U.S. Plastics Pact, we join like-minded companies seeking to dramatically increase recycling rates, accelerate the circular economy and contribute materially to the ambitious goal of 30% recycled content in plastic packaging by 2025.”
While the U.S. Pact is complementary to and follows the ambitious precedents set by the existing global network of Plastic Pacts, it will be tailored to meet the unique needs and challenges of the U.S. market. The U.S. Pact will reflect national priorities and realities, while still propelling the nation closer to other developed nations in its management of plastic waste.
“Together through the U.S. Plastics Pact, we will ignite system change to accelerate progress toward a circular economy,” says Emily Tipaldo, Executive Director of the U.S. Plastics Pact. “The U.S. Pact will mobilize systemwide change through support for upstream innovation and a coordinated national strategy. This unified framework will enable members to fast-track progress toward our ambitious 2025 sustainability goals. Members’ full participation is vital to reaching our shared goals.”
Achieving this vision will require new levels of accountability from all facets of the plastics supply chain. The U.S. Pact emphasizes measurable change and as such Nexus Circular is committed to transparent, annual reporting, WWF’s ReSource: Plastic Footprint Tracker, which will be used to document annual progress against our four goals. In June 2021, the U.S. Plastics Pact established a “Roadmap to 2025” which identifies key milestones and national solutions to achieving the U.S. targets and realize a circular economy in which plastic never becomes waste.
To date, Nexus Circular has diverted over 5 million lbs. of used plastics from landfills and is on a 2030 trajectory to convert 4 billion lbs of hard-to-recycle plastics into infinitely circular products to support our global supply partners’ sustainability commitments.
