On November 4, 2025, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation released its 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business. The blueprint encourages businesses to join them in moving towards a circular economy while advocating for policies that drive change.
Over the last ten years, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has worked with businesses and policymakers to move towards a circular economy with the goal of eliminating unnecessary plastics. In 2018, they created The Global Commitment 2025 in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme, with more than 1,200 businesses, governments, and other organizations from around the world committing to work towards this common vision (FPF reported).
The Global Commitment 2025 Progress Report showed that through this initiative, the 20% of the plastic packaging industry that signed on avoided 14 million tons of virgin plastic, tripled their use of recycled content, and eliminated over 775,000 tons of “problematic or unnecessary” food packaging. However, they were collectively unable to reach the original goal of ensuring that “100% of plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable, or compostable” by 2025 (FPF reported and here) and reported little to no change in reuse compared with 2018.
The new 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business aims to address the systemic barriers signatories faced in trying to achieve the initial goals of The Global Commitment, including challenges with the economics of scaling, tackling flexible plastic packaging waste, and developing collection and recycling infrastructure. The Agenda encourages companies to continue pursuing reuse strategies internally while collaborating with other businesses to lower risks and costs as well as advocating for ambitious policy changes to mobilize the remaining 80% of the plastics packaging market that has not signed on to The Global Commitment 2030.
References
Ellen MacArthur Foundation (November 4, 2025). “2030 Plastics Agenda for Business.”
Ellen MacArthur Foundation (November 4, 2025). “The Global Commitment 2025 Progress Report.”
