Inside Plastic’s Voluntary Commitment Movement

Why Voluntary Commitments Still Matter

When EPR laws specify performance targets, it’s tempting to conclude that voluntary sustainability goals become redundant. The opposite is closer to the truth. As Jonathan Quinn, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Plastics Pact (USPP), put it in September 2025, “EPR sets the floor, but voluntary commitments are what are going to set the pace.” Without voluntary ambition, progress may stall at compliance. Companies will only do what’s required and stop there.

Voluntary commitments also generate competitive motivation, which you can’t get from regulation. When a company publicly commits to specific targets on recycled content, recyclable design, or virgin plastic reduction, it creates another layer of accountability. The data requirements built into EPR reporting are beginning to give companies better information than they had when they first set goals, and that information is driving more thoughtful, better-calibrated commitments the second time around.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment

The largest voluntary effort on plastic waste and pollution in the world is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) Global Commitment, established in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). More than 1,200 organizations, from across the world, including ALPLA, have united behind its common vision of a circular economy for plastics.

The results from the first chapter of the Global Commitment, which concluded in 2025, are significant. Signatories representing 20% of all plastic packaging avoided the use of 14 million tonnes of virgin plastic, equivalent to keeping one barrel of oil in the ground every second. They tripled their use of recycled content, and avoided 7.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year. Those signatories outperformed the rest of the market across all target areas where comparable data exists, while continuing to be commercially competitive.

The Global Commitment’s second chapter is now underway, with businesses committing to 2030 targets and agreeing to report transparently on progress. The initiative has moved towards a broader market transformation approach, recognizing that individual business action is a critical component but not sufficient by itself. It’s now complemented by collaborative action and collective advocacy designed to remove the systemic barriers that individual signatories can’t address alone.

The U.S. Plastics Pact

At the national level, the USPP brings together companies and organizations across the entire plastic packaging system to develop and implement practical, scalable solutions. Its Roadmap 2.0, developed in collaboration with signatories that the Pact calls “Activators,” has evolved to include a more mature approach to system complexity than the original 2025 targets it has evolved from.

The framework organizes Activators around five interconnected targets: eliminating problematic and unnecessary plastic packaging, designing all plastic packaging for circularity, improving recycling and composting outcomes, reaching an average of 30% PCR or responsibly sourced bio-based content in plastic packaging, and scaling reuse systems. No single target stands alone. The Pact’s premise is that circularity only works when it functions across the entire packaging system, and that solutions must be technically feasible, economically viable, and scalable across the value chain.

Other Voluntary Commitments Across the Industry

Corporate commitment to reducing plastic pollution is significantly wider than the EMF and USPP. A peer-reviewed study published in the journal One Earth, led by researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, examined the voluntary commitments made by 973 companies, including the top 300 of the Fortune Global 500, between 2015 and 2020. They found that 72% of those companies had made some form of commitment to reduce plastic pollution, and that companies participating in voluntary environmental programs were far more likely to make commitments that were measurable and timebound.

Global initiatives like the Our Ocean Conference have become a key forum to coordinate global ocean action, with an estimated 67% of plastic-producing companies engaged in voluntary commitment processes through its platform.

These participation figures suggest that voluntary action on plastic has become the expectation, and the pressure to make those commitments specific, measurable, and publicly reported is only growing.

What Happens When Companies Fall Short — and What to Do About It

Not every company that set voluntary targets for 2025 met them. Some missed by a significant margin, and many have been working through how to communicate that honestly. Research and consulting firm Gartner projected earlier in 2025 that approximately 75% of organizations that voluntarily established sustainable packaging targets would sunset those goals by 2028.

That’s not as bad as it seems on the surface. The companies revising their targets aren’t necessarily abandoning sustainability. Many are doing the opposite, and using better data and clearer understanding of practical realities to set goals that are both more specific and more achievable. Beverage maker Diageo, for instance, publicly acknowledged in a recent sustainability update that it didn’t have all the answers when it set its 2020 goals. Five years on, it had better data, deeper insights, and a clearer view of what delivering on net zero actually requires.

After launching its PepsiCo Positive sustainability strategy in 2021, the company announced in May 2025 that it was reworking its packaging targets to account for what it called “external realities.” It retired its reuse goal and replaced its 20% absolute virgin plastic reduction target with an annual 2% reduction goal through 2030.

L'Oréal also fell short of its commitments for both recyclable packaging and recycled or bio-based material content by the end of 2025. In response, the company adjusted its sustainability roadmap and introduced new targets.

The lesson from the 2025 cycle is that voluntary commitments work best with honest accounting and revised targets grounded in real data. They also require industry-wide infrastructure, such as collection systems and material innovation, that no single company can build on its own.

Making Membership Matter

Voluntary commitments are only as meaningful as the reporting and accountability structures that surround them. The Global Commitment’s annual progress reports, the USPP’s structured Activator engagement, and the data transparency requirements now enforced by EPR laws together create a framework in which voluntary goals come with real reputational, commercial, and increasingly financial consequences.

The floor is set by regulation, but the pace is set by companies willing to go further.