Dedicated to advancing the circular economy in North America by improving residential recycling, providing technical assistance, and investing in the recycling value chain to reduce waste, create jobs and generate manufacturing feedstock. Over 60 very large companies and organizations (e.g., Coke, Procter and Gamble, the American Chemistry Council) provide support to the Partnership. Describes itself as “the leading organization” in the United States “that engages the full recycling supply chain”. The Partnership has worked with more than 2,000 communities to “have diverted more than 375M pounds of recyclables from landfills, avoided more than 420K metric tons of greenhouse gases, saved 968M gallons of water, and drove significant reductions in targeted contamination rates.”
The Partnership is a well-funded, corporately-focused operation.
Initiatives
- Pathway to Circularity: five key building blocks that make up the framework: packaging fate, capture journey, design for circularity, package prevalence, and MRF and community adoption
- Film and Flexibles Coalition: Addressing the operational challenges presented by these plastics to Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and the dearth of end markets for reprocessing them into raw materials
- Plastic IQ: Â Helping U.S. companies develop an effective plastic packaging strategy, work together to compare strategies with industry best practices, and prioritize innovative solutions to advance circularityÂ
- Polypropylene Recycling Coalition: increasing curbside recycling programs, sorting materials successfully, and stimulating end-market for reuse
- Circular Economy Accelerator: Putting all 37.4 million tons of residential recyclables back into the economy each year to support 370,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs and achieving the equivalent of removing 20 million cars from U.S. highways
Recent Publications
- Paying It Forward: How Investments in Recycling Will Pay Dividends (May 2021, 49p)
- Start at the Cart: Key Concepts of Influencing Recycling Behavior to Drive a Circular Economy (February 2021, 21p)
