Nestlé breaks down its path to 2030 for virgin plastic reduction

The food and beverage giant expects over half of its targeted virgin plastic decrease will come from upping recycled content. Nestlé previously focused on a 2025 recyclability target, of which it achieved about 90%.

What happened

Nestlé is honing its plastics reduction target, per its packaging sustainability strategy published this month.

Prior to 2025, Nestlé had emphasized various packaging sustainability targets, such as making all of its packaging recyclable, compostable or reusable. It ultimately achieved that for about 90% of its portfolio.

Why it matters

Now, the global food and beverage giant is emphasizing plans to cut virgin plastic use by between 12% to 17% come 2030, from a 2018 baseline, through three main avenues: incorporating more recycled content, reducing overall plastic use, and innovating with reuse and refill solutions. The company noted this target tries to take into account the planned sell-off of a stake in its water business for approximately $3.4 billion.

Nestlé expects more than half of its planned virgin plastic reduction in the next few years to come from incorporating more recycled plastic. As of 2025, there was about 21% recycled content in plastic packaging. As part of this effort, Nestlé says it’s engaged in research on the food safety of recycled plastics to expand the use of recycled PET.

Plastic accounted for about a quarter of Nestlé's packaging portfolio by weight in 2025. Nestlé’s total plastics packaging use had dropped to 0.86 million metric tons in 2025 from 1.7 million tons in 2018.

This news brief is based on reporting published by Packaging Dive on 2026-09-24. The original report is linked below.