The more than 13,000 products and materials we make deliver fresh, safe, and convenient food and beverages to consumers. Our products help to reduce food waste by protecting foods and beverages during transport, extending product shelf-life and reducing the threat of contamination. Safety and convenience are more important than ever during a global pandemic that has imposed limits on dining and shopping options and increased the need for products that make take-out meals possible and guard against contamination.
In 2020, we announced a bold new product goal that by 2030, 100% of our products will be made with recycled, recyclable or renewable materials. We are nearly two-thirds of the way towards our goal based on 2019 net revenues, and in the next decade, we will work on achieving that 100% goal.
We’re proud to share some of our initiatives in this field below. For more details, read our 2019-2020 Sustainability report.
Our Four R’s approach zeroes in on four key sustainability drivers: reduce, reuse, recycle, renew. Our new sustainable packaging goal focuses on the materials that go into our products where we have a high degree of control.
As part of our sustainability strategy, we are expanding our commitment to sustainable packaging with a goal to build the environmental attributes embodied in our Four R’s into every single product we sell:
We want consumers to reuse, recycle or compost our products when they are done with them, and we strive to design products for these end-of-life scenarios. We also work with cross-industry partnerships and diverse stakeholders to boost post-consumer recycling and composting and build a circular economy.
Our Beverage Merchandising business unit offers a wide selection of paper and paperboard for the paper converting industry. While we consume some of the fiber internally, we sell over 1 million tons of paper and paperboard every year that ultimately become envelopes, printing paper, shopping bags, cartons and other items made by Pactiv Evergreen and other converters. Moreover, all of our paper is made from trees grown in forests where responsible forestry practices are followed. Expanding the use of those practices is a core part of our daily work. In the areas where Evergreen sources wood for our paper products, we believe the overall rate of growth exceeds use.
To meet growing demand for sustainable products, we are making significant investments in research and development — over $20 million in 2019 alone.
At our state-of-the-art technology and innovation facilities, our teams are engineering new materials, improving the performance of our existing products, and commercializing more environmentally friendly packaging solutions based on our Four R’s. In fact, for any new product we develop, sustainability is one of our primary assessment criteria, along with cost, efficiency, quality and customer needs.
At Pactiv Evergreen, we believe that partnerships are the key to driving meaningful change. As just one manufacturer, we cannot by ourselves transform the complex patchwork of recycling and composting systems across North America.
Therefore, we collaborate with various partners to expand opportunities for consumers to recycle or compost our products.
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