1. Changing the Nature of Business

Opportunities to Engage: Plastic Waste

Plastic waste is choking our planet, polluting the air, water, and soil both people and wildlife need to survive. While plastic can help make our hospitals safer, our food last longer, and our packages more efficient to ship, it has no place in nature—yet every year, an estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic enter our oceans. As this crisis spreads to every corner of the globe, WWF is fighting for a world with no plastic in nature by 2030. It's a world where our oceans teem with marine life, not discarded nets, bottles and bags. Where no human breathes the toxic fumes of burning plastic. And where every indispensable plastic product is used to make another.

WWF works with companies to tap into their potential as a key lever to tackle this crisis, across programs that focus on interventions for reimagining how the world sources, designs, disposes of, and reuses the plastic materials communities most depend upon.

  • Resource: Plastic

    While business has been largely responsible for creating and exacerbating plastic pollution, it also has a necessary role to play in transforming the broken plastic material system. By engaging supply chains and effective action, as few as 100 companies can prevent 50 million metric tons of the world's plastic waste by 2030. WWF launched ReSource: Plastic in 2019 to tap into this potential by equipping companies with the roadmap to get there.

    ReSource: Plastic brings together a consortium of some of the world's leading companies to translate their large-scale commitments into meaningful, measurable progress. Using an innovative methodology to measure corporate plastic footprints, ReSource helps its member companies identify what actions can maximize and multiply their potential for impact. Member companies track the progress of these activities in an annual public report. You can find the inaugural report, Transparent 2020, here.

    A variety of plastic trash gathered on a beach

  • Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance (BFA)

    The Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance provides thought leadership on the responsible sourcing of bioplastics, and the role of bioplastic in circular systems. Formed by some of the world’s leading consumer brand companies as a multi-stakeholder forum, BFA explores the latest science to advance knowledge of bioplastics and their social and environmental impacts. BFA aims to ensure bioplastics ultimately contribute to a more sustainable flow of materials, to create lasting value for present and future generations.

    A kelp farmer inspects a line of young sugar kelp off the coast of Maine from a boat.

  • Co-leadership on the U.S. Plastics Pact

    The U.S. Plastics Pact, a collaborative led by The Recycling Partnership and WWF, launched in 2020 as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's global Plastics Pact network. The U.S. Plastics Pact is an ambitious initiative to unify diverse public-private stakeholders across the plastics value chain to rethink the way we design, use, and reuse plastics, to create a path toward a circular economy for plastic in the United States.

    Aerial view of a cargo ship transports containers of garbage across blue waters for recycling factory.

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