On November 1, 2025, the U.S. Plastics Pact, in partnership with WRAP and Upstream, announced the second phase of its joint Reuse in Retail Initiative (RRI). This collaborative program is designed to bring together brands, retailers, and reuse providers to find the best strategy to effectively implement reuse, preempt extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation, and respond to consumer demand for sustainable packaging.
The overall idea of the initiative is to co-design financially, operationally, and socially visible reuse systems that can be scaled nationwide. The U.S. Plastics Pact will bring its workstream of reuse providers, brands, retailers, local governments, and nonprofits while Upstream will add its reuse and asset expertise and WRAP will contribute its consumer engagement research and pilot learnings.
In this scoping phase, which will go until December 2025, nine participating brands, retailers, and organizations will select two feasible product categories to target for reuse, choose reuse models, and identify regions for implementation. This segment of the project will conclude with data-driven recommendations that include an end-to-end reuse systems map, consumer engagement plan, and stakeholder analysis grid that has been designed to maximize consumer adoption and economic viability.
This second phase follows the interest building phase of the project, which took place from February 2025 to August 2025 and aimed to determine the ideal product categories to target. As part of this phase, Closed Loop Partners and the U.S. Plastics Pact published the Getting Ready for Reuse in Retail report analyzing the 10 consumer product categories that account for over 90% of purchased packaged goods sold in U.S. grocery retail stores. They then identified the top five retail categories that would be best suited for re-use: prepared food packaging in retail, fresh produce containers, beverage bottles, home care product bottles, and personal care product bottles.
With these two phases complete, the next phases of the RRI will focus on designing the reuse program (January 2026 to December 2026), developing solutions (January 2027 to June 2027), and preparing for implementation (July 2027 to December 2027), followed by a program launch in 2028.
The RRI aligns with the U.S Plastics Pact’s Roadmap 2.0, released in 2024, which added a new target to “identify viable reusable packaging systems and increase their implementation and scale by 2030, as part of reducing the use of virgin plastics.” The consortium, which launched in 2020 (FPF reported), was unable to meet any of its established targets outlined in its original “Roadmap To 2025” strategy (FPF reported).
References
U.S. Plastics Pact (November 1, 2025). “U.S. Plastics Pact Launches Next Phase of Reuse in Retail Initiative to Bring Scalable, Cost-Effective Real-World Implementation to U.S. Stores.”
Closed Loop Partners (March 11, 2025). “Getting Ready for Reuse in Retail.”
U.S. Plastics Pact (June 11, 2024). “U.S. Plastics Pact Roadmap 2.0.”
Read more
U.S. Plastics Pact. “2025 Retail Reuse Initiative One Sheet.”
