In early November 2025, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), in close collaboration with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), released the 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business.

This document serves as a forward-looking, business-oriented blueprint and roadmap building directly on the Global Commitment initiative (launched in 2018 by EMF and UNEP), which was the world’s largest voluntary effort to address plastic waste and pollution.

Key Details on the 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business

• Release Date and Context: Launched alongside the final Global Commitment 2025 Progress Report (covering 2024 data and reflecting on a decade of voluntary action). The Agenda extends the Global Commitment into its next phase (“Global Commitment 2030”), where signatories recommit with updated targets and transparent reporting.
• Core Purpose: It provides a practical, evidence-based framework for businesses to accelerate the transition to a circular economy for plastics — eliminating unnecessary plastic, innovating with alternatives/reuse models, and circulating what’s needed to prevent waste and pollution. It reflects lessons from the 2018–2025 period, where individual company efforts hit systemic barriers (e.g., economics of scaling recycling, flexible packaging challenges, infrastructure gaps).
• Three Main Pillars/Levers (as outlined in the Agenda):
  1. Collective Advocacy: Businesses proactively pushing for ambitious, effective, and harmonized regulations/policies (e.g., supporting measures like extended producer responsibility, minimum recycled content mandates, bans on problematic items, and alignment with ongoing global plastics treaty negotiations).
  2. Collaborative Action: Joint efforts across the value chain to de-risk investments, share costs, scale solutions (e.g., reuse systems, infrastructure for collection/recycling), and overcome barriers no single company can tackle alone.
  3. Individual Action: Companies continuing internal innovations, such as reducing virgin plastic, increasing post-consumer recycled (PCR) content, redesigning for recyclability/reuse/compostability, and eliminating problematic/unnecessary packaging.
• Signatory Support and Scale: Backed by leading companies (representing ~20% of the global plastic packaging market), including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, SC Johnson, Danone, L’Oréal, Amcor, Borealis, Colgate-Palmolive, and TOMRA. It urges broader industry adoption.
• Link to Enforceability: The Agenda strongly advocates for turning voluntary commitments into stronger, policy-driven outcomes. It calls on businesses to collectively influence and support effective regulations (e.g., via advocacy coalitions) to level the playing field, lower transition costs, and make circular models economically viable. However, the Agenda itself remains a voluntary, business-led framework — not a binding international policy or treaty. It complements (and pushes for alignment with) multilateral efforts like the UN’s ongoing Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, which aim for legally binding global rules.

From CFACT

By Melanie Collette

In November 2025, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the UN Environment Programme, released its 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business – a global framework that aspires to turn voluntary sustainability pledges into enforceable international policies.

The report drew significant attention for its call to expand Extended Producer Responsibility systems, standardize packaging design, and align national laws under a single circular economy model. In response, CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Melanie Collette authored The Next Plastics Playbook, which challenges several of the Foundation’s claims and examines the implications for innovation, competition, and national sovereignty.

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