Mondelēz International today advanced its commitment to helping create a circular economy for plastic by joining the Circulate Capital Ocean Fund (CCOF) as a limited partner and making an investment in CCOF supporting scalable business solutions to help develop infrastructure for the collecting, sorting and recycling of plastic waste, including flexible films. The goal of this investment, which is part of Mondelēz International’s Sustainable Futures impact investing platform, is to enhance focus on the physical collection of flexible films – lightweight, multi-layer plastics used by the snacking industry – that have traditionally been more difficult to collect, sort, recycle and ultimately reuse.
CCOF is an investment fund dedicated to addressing India and Southeast Asia’s plastics challenges, and its investors include some of the world’s leading consumer packaged goods companies. The fund provides financing to waste management, recycling and circular economy start-ups and small- and medium-sized enterprises across India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. CCOF helps identify collection and recycling solutions, catalyzes capital to both scales and replicates those solutions and connects these enterprises to the world’s leading companies. Mondelēz International’s investment in CCOF is expected to finance enterprises that support the company’s goal to collect more plastic waste than the company currently produces across India and Southeast Asia and will further CCOF’s investments into flexible plastic waste collection, recycling and infrastructure enterprises.
“This investment marks a pivotal step forward in our contribution to a circular economy for plastics and is a clear demonstration of our long-term goal of net zero waste,” said Dirk Van de Put, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mondelēz International, Inc. “As part of our ambition to become a more sustainable snacking company, this partnership will help fund businesses that are trying to fill systemic gaps in the collection, sorting and reuse of plastic waste, including flexible film.”
Mondelēz International has already made significant progress toward its packaging recyclability targets. The company has removed 65,000 tons of packaging from its portfolio since 2013 and remains on track to achieve its 2025 goals to reduce virgin plastic use in rigid plastic packaging by 25% or reduce virgin plastic in overall plastic packaging portfolio by 5%, increase use of recycled content to 5% by weight across plastic packaging and design 100% of its packaging to be recycle-ready. To date, some 94% of all of the company’s packaging is designed to be recycle-ready.
