Alliance to End Plastic Waste Progress Report: What the First Year of Strategy 2030 Delivered

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste progress report for 2025, titled “Strategy in Action”, was published in Singapore on 9 September 2026. It closes the first full year since the organisation’s new long-term strategy took effect. The document is worth reading for its numbers, but for anyone working in waste management the more useful story is structural: the Alliance has deliberately abandoned the model of funding many small, standalone projects in favour of a handful of large, country-level programmes.

This article walks through what the report contains, what the published figures actually mean, and what is transferable to European — and Hungarian — practice.

What the Alliance to End Plastic Waste Progress Report Covers for 2025

The Alliance was founded in 2019 by major chemical, packaging and consumer goods companies with the stated aim of stopping plastic from leaking into the environment. The membership list tells its own story: BASF, Dow, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, SABIC, Shell, Procter & Gamble, TotalEnergies, Braskem, Reliance and several dozen more. Tracey Campbell (LyondellBasell) chairs the organisation; Jacob Duer is President and CEO.

The core message of the report is that 2025 was the first implementation year of Strategy 2030. The previous approach — supporting many independent small projects across dozens of countries — has been replaced by two pillars:

• Country Programs: developing the full collection–sorting–recycling chain in a small number of selected markets, alongside governments and development finance institutions, with at least US$100 million in co-financing per territory.
• Thematic Programs: material streams where circularity has stalled for technical and market reasons. The first theme is flexible plastic packaging.

The reasoning is straightforward. Many small projects produce visible results faster, but do not necessarily change systems. The report says openly that large integrated projects take longer to ramp up while leaving a more durable mark.

The Headline Numbers

For 2025, and cumulatively since 2019:

• 138,162 tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste reduced in 2025; 378,147 tonnes since 2019.
• 165,317 tonnes of plastic waste valorised in 2025; 418,529 tonnes since inception.
• 31,815 tonnes/year of new technical capacity installed in 2025; 211,263 tonnes/year in total.
• 559 organisations engaged in 2025 to finance, develop and deliver projects.
• 746,253 people reached through education and behaviour-change programmes in 2025; over 1.5 million since inception.
• US$66 million in member revenue in 2025; US$509 million since 2019, of which US$410 million has been allocated to programmes and mission-related activity.
• US$641 million in external funding commitments catalysed from third parties and impact investors.
• 129 projects supported worldwide since 2019.

One detail that is easy to miss: the headline impact metrics were put through an independent limited assurance engagement by DNV under ISAE 3000, with six site visits in South Africa, Tanzania, India, Indonesia and Kenya. In a sector where self-reported tonnage is the norm, that is not a given, and it is a reasonable benchmark to hold other reports against.

Country Programs: Building Systems Where None Exist

The Country Programs run in Brazil, the Gulf region (starting with Saudi Arabia), India, Indonesia and South Africa. The same diagnosis recurs in each: the missing ingredient is rarely technology. It is functioning collection infrastructure, reliable data, and an end market able to pay.

Indonesia. The country generates 3.2 million tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste a year and is the world’s second-largest contributor of marine plastic leakage. The Alliance attached itself to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s roughly US$150 million lending programme covering more than ten cities and districts, becoming in 2024 the AIIB’s first private-sector grant contributor. In 2025 it launched an integrated waste management pilot in Malang Regency, East Java, combining source segregation, collection infrastructure, sorting capacity and links to local recyclers. A mini materials recovery facility for the twelve-village pilot was commissioned in March 2026. The Alliance has committed up to a further US$40 million to carry the pilot’s principles into other project cities.

India. The flagship is ParikraM in Mathura-Vrindavan, a pilgrimage cluster that hosts around 23 million visitors a year and generates 400–500 tonnes of waste a day, with sharp festival peaks. The municipality provided land and tipping floor infrastructure, the Alliance financed the recovery facility, and Recity operates it. The plant currently runs at 75% capacity; at full capacity it would process up to 300 tonnes of mixed municipal waste daily and divert 80% of the city’s waste from landfill. Non-recyclable material becomes refuse-derived fuel for cement kilns, in line with Indian regulations. A second project, MERIT, targets flexible plastic collection and sorting specifically.

South Africa. Here the emphasis has shifted from pilots to system-level rollout. In 2024 and 2025 the Alliance signed memoranda of understanding with the environment department and the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and began a feasibility study on integrated municipal waste management across six cities. Two projects stand out: the African Reclaimers Organisation, which registers waste reclaimers on the national system — giving them identification, access and service-fee income — and Eco Renew Recyclers, which produces recycled LDPE pellets and now holds multi-year offtake agreements of roughly 2,400 tonnes a year. The local Plastics Pact has committed producers to a 20% cut in virgin plastic use and 70% recyclable flexible packaging by 2030.

Flexible Packaging: The Hardest Problem

Flexibles were chosen as the first thematic topic for good reason. They are light, multi-layer, often contaminated, and low in bulk density — expensive to transport and difficult to sort mechanically. The report states plainly what many practitioners know but rarely write down: without a functioning end market there is no path to scale. So the programme works backwards. It first identifies which applications will buy the recyclate and at what specification, and only then builds infrastructure.

The programme started in Europe and North America, where waste management foundations, policy frameworks and economic capacity already exist. Three concrete threads:

• Phoenix, Arizona: RME Defeats Waste installs on-site mini balers and on-demand collection at low-volume generators — factories, hospitals, logistics sites, stadiums. One food manufacturing site recovered more than four tonnes of flexible plastic from landfill within three months. The aim is 35 mini balers across the metro area.
• Nextek / COtooCLEAN (London): supercritical CO₂ removes contaminants from post-consumer films so they can be recycled into food-grade packaging.
• HolyGrail 2.0: a project of AIM – European Brands Association using digital watermarks. Industrial-scale trials achieved detection efficiency between 87.9% and 93.8%, averaging 56,000 detections a day — 5.66 million detections across 5,949 unique products over 100 days. The follow-on, HolyGrail 2030, moves into market adoption with flexible PP food packaging in Belgium and rigid PP in Germany.

This is the section most directly useful to European readers, because the same questions press on domestic systems: is there an offtaker, at what quality, and what does it cost to get there.

No Systems Change Without Capital

The report devotes a full chapter to financing, and this is where it reveals the most about where the issue actually stands. The recurring conclusion: availability of capital is not the constraint. Investable projects are — with predictable revenue, workable risk allocation, a path to profitability within three to five years, and continuous financing over seven to fifteen years.

What the Alliance did about it: it joined the Green Investments Partnership, a blended finance programme under Singapore’s FAST-P initiative and managed by Pentagreen Capital (established by HSBC and Temasek), taking a junior interest position — using its own capital to reduce risk for senior lenders. Separately, the Plastic Circularity Strategy it co-designed and seeded with Lombard Odier Investment Managers reached final close and continues to invest in companies such as Spain’s Fych Technologies (delamination and steam decontamination of multi-layer film) and Switzerland’s Bloom Biorenewables (non-edible biomass into bio-based chemicals, with a US$15 million Series A).

The proportions are telling too: of the US$410 million allocated since 2019, 44% went to Country Programs, 12% to Thematic Programs, and 38% to the earlier portfolio of individual projects.

How to Read These Numbers

This is where it pays to slow down. The report itself notes that the world generates roughly 360 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, a figure that has grown more than sevenfold in four decades. Against that, the 378,000 tonnes addressed since 2019 amounts to a fraction of one percent of a single year’s global total.

This is not an attempt to discredit the Alliance — the report does not claim tonnage is the point. It is a question of what an organisation like this is good for. It is good for demonstration, de-risking, testing models and mobilising development finance capital. Reversing global plastic flows is beyond any single industry association, and the closing chapter effectively concedes as much when it expresses hope for a legally binding global plastics treaty.

The other thing worth remembering is that “avoided” or “reduced” waste is a methodological question in every report of this kind. That is precisely why a published Basis of Reporting and external assurance matter. Anyone building comparable indicators for a domestic project could do worse than copy the structure: definition, data collection process, third-party verification.

What This Means for European and Hungarian Practice

Four takeaways worth carrying over:

1. End market first, investment second. For flexibles, the Alliance deliberately works back from user demand. That order protects domestic film collection and recycling plans from building capacity nobody will buy from.
2. Data is a precondition for investment. The Saudi and Brazilian sections carry the same sentence: without data and transparency there is no bankable project. Anyone measuring in a tender or concession environment will recognise the problem.
3. The social side is not optional. The Alliance applies a human rights due diligence checklist to every funding recipient and has built a separate just transition framework. Formalising waste pickers in South Africa and India is not a PR line — it is a precondition of collection efficiency.
4. Blended finance is unavoidable. Junior capital, guarantees and outcome-based lending are becoming more important in Europe too, as packaging regulation tightens and recycled content requirements become mandatory.

Where to Read the Full Report

The full text of “Strategy in Action” and the accompanying press release are available on the Alliance’s site: the report at endplasticwaste.org/report2025, and the announcement in the organisation’s newsroom. Readers interested in methodology should look at the Basis of Reporting 2025 document and the DNV assurance statement at the end of the report.

Perhaps the final lesson of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste progress report is this: plastic circularity has become a systems and financing question rather than a technological one. The solutions largely exist. The open question is who pays for the ramp-up, and how long they are willing to wait for the result.

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Frequently Asked Questions About the Alliance to End Plastic Waste Progress Report

What is the Alliance to End Plastic Waste?

It is an international alliance founded in 2019 by major chemical, packaging and consumer goods companies with the aim of stopping plastic from leaking into the environment. Members include BASF, Dow, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, SABIC, Shell and Procter & Gamble. Tracey Campbell chairs the organisation and Jacob Duer is President and CEO.

How much waste did the Alliance address in 2025?

It reported reducing 138,162 tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste and valorising 165,317 tonnes during 2025. Cumulative figures since inception in 2019 stand at 378,147 tonnes reduced and 418,529 tonnes valorised. The Alliance also installed 31,815 tonnes per year of new technical capacity during the reporting period.

What is Strategy 2030 built around?

Strategy 2030 rests on two pillars. Country Programs develop the full collection, sorting and recycling chain in a small number of selected markets, with at least US$100 million in co-financing per territory. Thematic Programs target material streams where circularity has stalled, beginning with flexible plastic packaging.

Which countries have Country Programs?

Brazil, the Gulf region starting with Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia and South Africa. The thematic programme on flexible plastics runs instead in Europe and North America, where waste management foundations, supportive policy frameworks and end-market capacity are already in place or being established.

Was the report’s data independently verified?

Yes. DNV conducted a limited assurance engagement over the selected top-level impact metrics under the ISAE 3000 standard, including six project site visits in South Africa, Tanzania, India, Indonesia and Kenya. The underlying methodology is set out in the publicly available Basis of Reporting 2025 document.

How much capital has the Alliance mobilised?

Since 2019 it has catalysed US$641 million in funding commitments from third parties and impact investors. Member revenue totals US$509 million, of which US$410 million has been allocated to programmes and mission-related activity. Of that allocation, 44% went to Country Programs and 12% to Thematic Programs.