The packaging sector is growing - to cater for the increasing number of products being transported around the world. However, much of the packaging is not recyclable or ends up polluting our soils, rivers and oceans.

Paper-based packaging accounts for about 50 percent of all pulp and paper produced annually. Nestlé and Earthworm Foundation are working on Pulp and Paper packaging as part of their No Deforestation and Forest Positive commitments.

Through our traceability work we estimate that 55% of all of Nestlé’s raw material for packaging is from recovered sources. This depends upon the product type and the geography.

There is lots of innovation on this front at the design stage to use recyclable and biodegradable products as well as create collection systems to increase recycling rates so that these products can enter back into the system, also known as the circular economy.

Alastair Herd notes that “while our focus has been on the Virgin fibre aspects of supporting Nestlé to meet their No-Deforestation commitments, we do recognise that there are also challenges to address in the recovered fibre supply chains and because of this we have been exploring and building our knowledge in these issues in a couple of prioritised supply chains”

One of the locations we have prioritised is in Brasil where we have been piloting a franchise model with you Green and Nestlé in 2021 to empower collector communities and improve practices in their collection efficiencies and access to markets and reenter Nestlé’s supply - see link to video

To date EF/YouGreen have trained one cooperative in 2020 and in 2021 we will accompany the work that this cooperative is performing as well as look to scale up the training/model to a further 4 cooperatives.

Dov - this is an exciting opportunity that we are trialing in these Urban Landscapes and the impact that we can have on these communities and finding solutions to improve collection efficiencies in how we are best maximizing and using our raw materials to their full potential and contribute towards the climate and nature crises.

Cristiani - this is a challenge for all FMCGs and we look forward to engaging and collaborating further with our peers on these issues and finding solutions on paper based packaging as well as plastics and others