Kimberly-Clark Reinforces Commitment to Plastics Footprint Reduction as Founding Activator of US Plastics Pact

Kimberly-Clark knows that strategic partnerships are critical to unlocking new opportunities for sustainability, innovation and growth across its value chain. More importantly, consumers of its trusted brands, including Kleenex®, Cottonelle®, Scott® and Huggies®, want more sustainable options.

Reinforcing its commitment to address the social and environmental challenges of the next decade, the company announced yesterday that it joined as a founding activator the newly formed U.S. Plastics Pact.

“Innovating our packaging to use less plastic and more renewable materials is an important part of our commitment to consumers to reduce our environmental footprint,” says Kristi Schroeder, North American Design and Packaging Director for Kimberly-Clark. “We are excited to join the U.S. Plastics Pact because it will allow us to collaborate with other activators to find scalable solutions that not only advance our goals at Kimberly-Clark but create programs for consumers to reduce plastic waste.”

As Founding Activators of the Pact, Kimberly-Clark has agreed to support the collective delivery on the following commitments:

• By 2021, define a list of packaging to be designated as problematic or unnecessary and take measures to eliminate them by 2025.
• By 2025, all plastic packaging is 100% reusable, recyclable, or compostable.
• By 2025, undertake ambitious actions to effectively recycle or compost 50% of plastic packaging.
• By 2025, the average recycled content or responsibly sourced bio-based content in plastic packaging will be 30%.

“We know that in order to achieve 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025, we must drive innovation in our packaging materials to eliminate hard-to-recycle plastics while also creating end market demand through the use of recycled content,” says Daniel Locke, Global Sustainability Packaging Lead at Kimberly-Clark. “By joining the U.S. Plastics Pact, we are committing to ambitious goals that will help drive systems change towards a circular economy.”

The US Plastics Pact is led by The Recycling Partnership and World Wildlife Fund (“WWF”) as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Plastic Pact Network. This collaborative initiative will unify stakeholder approaches across the entire plastics value chain to rethink the way plastic is designed, used, and reused.

Kimberly-Clark joined the Wrap UK Plastics Pact in 2018 and continues to work towards its 2025 targets in the United Kingdom.