Key Takeaways:
2025 marks a pivotal moment for the US Plastics Pact (USPP), signaling a shift from ambition to action. Having established shared goals and alignment through its Roadmap to 2025, the Pact now enters an era of execution with Roadmap 2.0. The latest edition focuses on translating commitments into measurable, scalable systems that reduce plastic waste and accelerate a circular economy for plastic packaging across the United States.
The transition from Roadmap to 2025 to Roadmap 2.0 represents a strategic shift from alignment and goal setting to execution and system building. While Roadmap to 2025 established shared targets, definitions, and foundational frameworks across the plastics value chain, Roadmap 2.0 is focused on translating that alignment into practical, scalable solutions. This next phase prioritizes cross-value chain collaboration, recognizing that circularity cannot be achieved by individual actors working in isolation. Instead, it emphasizes coordinated action, policy engagement, and commercially viable systems that can operate at scale, moving circular economy principles from pilots and concepts into real-world implementation.
Target One of Roadmap 2.0 focuses on eliminating all items on the US Plastics Pact’s “Problematic and Unnecessary” Materials List while reducing virgin plastic use by 30% by 2030. Building on the consensus reached in 2021, a consortium of “Activators” worked collaboratively to identify materials that undermine recyclability, reuse, or human and environmental health, updating the list in 2024 to reflect new data and technological developments.
Progress is already underway: in 2024, 29% of Activators reported selling no items on the list, signalling early momentum despite data collection challenges. The addition of a virgin plastic reduction goal marks a critical shift toward true circularity, emphasising material reduction, reuse, and increased Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) content use over continued reliance on new plastic production.
Looking ahead, USPP will support implementation through design guidance, education, supplier transparency, and new workstreams, including source reduction and chemicals of concern, to drive systemic change across packaging design and supply chains.
Target Two of Roadmap 2.0 commits USPP Activators to designing and manufacturing 100% of plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable, recognizing design as the foundational enabler of circular systems. Central to this effort are the Design of Circularity Playbooks, which translate evolving research, certification standards, and best practices into practical guidance aligned with the APR Design Guide (created by the Association of Plastic Recylers), compostability certifications, and reuse specifications. Updated in 2025 and set for further refinement in 2026, the Playbooks support companies in navigating system complexity while designing for real-world-end-of-life outcomes. Progress is tracked through both design compliance and system readiness, reflecting the need to advance packaging redesign alongside the scaling of collection, recycling, reuse, and composting infrastructure.
In 2025, 63% of Activators’ plastic packaging was designed in line with circularity guidance, while 54% was reusable, recyclable, or compostable in practice and at scale. Through technical workshops, innovation awards, standards development, and partnerships such as the reuse-focused collaboration with Closed Loop Partners, USPP is accelerating circular redesign and helping translate design intent into commercially viable circular pathways.
Target Three focuses on effectively recycling 50% of plastic packaging while establishing the policy, infrastructure, and market frameworks needed to recycle or compost packaging at scale. Progress begins from a clear baseline: the US plastic packaging recycling rate remains at 13.3%, calculated using data from the Environmental Protection Agency and supplemented by APR and NAPCOR (National Association for PET Container Resources) insights.
Acknowledging that no single intervention can close this gap, the USPP advances a systems-based approach that combines circular design, technology innovation, expanded collection, end-market development for postconsumer recycled content, and consumer engagement. Policy-enabled action is central to this strategy, reflected in the USPP’s consensus-built Extended Producer Responsibility Policy Position Paper and support for aligned legislative tools such as OLPN’s CIRCLE (an acronym for Cultivating Investment in Recycling and Circular Local Economies, created by the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network). Alongside policy, multi-stakeholder initiatives target high-impact formats, including the roadmap “Journey to Film & Flex Circularity,” drafted by Film & Flex Workstream, and the Packaging Recyclability Advancement Task Force, which addresses collection, reprocessing, and labelling barriers. Together, these efforts aim to translate redesigned packaging into real recovery outcomes and build the integrated systems required to achieve recycling at commercial scale.
Target Four aims to achieve an average of 30% postconsumer recycled (PCR) or responsibly sourced biobased content across all plastic packaging, recognizing material sourcing as a critical lever for circularity. Progress remains challenging: in 2025, USPP Activators averaged just 14% PCR or biobased content, reflecting persistent supply constraints and fragile end markets, while facility closures underscored a core reality of the recycling economy. Without sustained, profitable demand for PCR, supply cannot scale. In response, the USPP has focused on stabilizing and growing PCR markets through coordinated policy and market interventions, including position papers addressing barriers to PCR adoption and clarifying the role and safeguards of physical and chemical recycling. Practical tools such as an expanded PCR Toolkit and certification guidance support cross-function corporate action, particularly within procurement.
While responsibly sourcing biobased content remains negligible, increased PCR use directly reduces reliance on virgin fossil-based plastics. This links progress on Target Four to upstream redesign efforts and downstream system expansion, reinforcing the interdependence of the roadmap’s goals.
Target Five elevates reuse as a core strategy for reducing virgin plastic by identifying and scaling viable reusable packaging systems by 2030. Long underutilized, reuse has the potential to deliver outsized impact: recent studies indicate that two-thirds of the 66 million tons of plastic packaging that pollute the global environment each year could be eliminated by 2040 through return and reuse models.
Introduced in Roadmap 2.0, this target reflects a recognition that recycling alone is insufficient, and that durable, shared systems are essential to true circularity. Because reuse infrastructure remains complex, the USPP has not yet set a quantified metric, instead prioritizing collaborative system design to avoid the high failure rates seen in isolated, single-company pilots.
In 2025, Activators advanced this work through the Reuse Workstream and the Reuse in Retail Initiative (RRI), a precompetitive effort bringing brands, retailers, and experts together to design consumer-ready reuse systems aligned with Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements. The RRI’s scoping phase produced concrete outputs, including system maps, consumer experience strategies, and stakeholder analyses. Through these initiatives, and by spotlighting reuse and refill innovations via the Sustainable Packaging Innovation Awards, the USPP is laying the groundwork for commercially viable, scalable reuse models that can meaningfully reduce dependence on single-use plastics.
The USPP and its Roadmap 2.0 offer more than sustainability ambition; they provide a practical blueprint for operating in a rapidly shifting regulatory, commercial, and consumer landscape. Beauty is one of the most packaging-intensive industries, making it both highly exposed to risk and uniquely positioned to lead. The Pact’s focus on execution, design standards, PCR procurement, policy alignment, and emerging reuse systems directly intersects with the challenges beauty brands face today: EPR compliance, material innovation, cost volatility, and rising expectations for credibility and transparency.
By translating circular economy principles into actionable tools and cross-value-chain collaboration, the Roadmap helps beauty companies move beyond pilot projects and toward solutions that work at shelf, at scale, and across portfolios. The Pact just may turn packaging from a liability into a source of resilience, differentiation, and long-term value.