Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
This week’s highlights:
- U.S.-based food processing company General Mills is facing renewed calls to remove plastic chemicals from its products. The advocacy group Consumer Reports is again sounding the alarm on General Mills – which operates brands like Cheerios cerial and Häagen-Dazs ice cream – for producing a range of products found to contain chemicals linked to hormone problems, certain diseases and birth defects. Advocates delivered a petition with more than 30,000 signatures to General Mills’ headquarters in Minnesota, calling on the company to address potentially hazardous plastic chemicals in its food. (CBS News)
- Mondelez International, one of the world’s largest snack producers, says it has removed over 1,000 tonnes of virgin plastic from its supply chain in 2023. This outcome is reportedly attributed to redesigned packaging that uses post-consumer recycled content and the removal of outer plastic wrapping in its chocolate products. Mondelez has set a bigger target to reduce virgin plastic in its rigid plastic packaging by at least 25%, and in all plastic packaging by 5%, by 2025. (Packaging Europe)
- French companies have developed a PET bottle made from enzymatic recycling. Carbios, a France-based company that uses biological technologies to recycle plastic and textiles, and international France-based cosmetics brand L’Occitane en Provence have partnered to develop a transparent polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle made entirely from enzymatic recycling for a shower oil from the Amande range. According to Carbios’ CEO, this development accelerates the transition to a circular economy and significantly reduces CO2 emissions – but all players in the value chain must get involved in order to create an efficient recycling sector. (Recycling Today)