Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the great rPET pledge reset

What actually changed

In early December 2024, The Coca-Cola Company published what it called evolved voluntary environmental goals. Three changes stood out. The company now aims to use 35% to 40% recycled material in its packaging by 2035, replacing its previous target of 50% by 2030. Its 2022 commitment to sell 25% of beverages in reusable packaging by 2030 disappeared from the new framework. And a separate pledge to cut cumulative virgin-plastic use by 3 million metric tons between 2020 and 2025 was likewise retired.

In May 2025, PepsiCo announced its own reset along strikingly similar lines: a goal of 40% recycled plastic by 2035 in place of 50% by 2030, and the end of its target to deliver 20% of beverage servings through reusable models. The company pointed to external constraints: a shortage of well-designed extended producer responsibility systems around the world, the fact that India only began allowing rPET in beverage packaging in 2023, and China's continued prohibition of food-grade recycled content.

The symmetry matters. When the two reference buyers of food-grade rPET move their targets in the same direction within months of each other, that is not two press releases. That is the voluntary-demand era repricing itself.

The honest context

Two facts complicate the simple backsliding narrative. First, the operational numbers kept moving forward even as the promises moved back: PepsiCo's own reporting shows recycled content in its packaging rising 15% in 2024 while virgin plastic use fell 5%. Recycled content in US PET bottles overall reached 15.9% on average, near record levels, as we detail in our analysis of the US PET recycling rate. The brands are buying more recycled material than ever. They are promising less about how much more they will buy.

Second, the original targets were arguably never load-bearing. A 50%-by-2030 pledge made in a boom year carried no penalty for failure beyond reputation. The revised numbers read like what procurement teams believed all along, published under the companies' own letterheads. In that sense the reset added information to the market rather than removing demand from it.

The environmental community read it differently, and understandably: advocacy groups documented the disappearance of reuse targets with precision and heat, and the timing, weeks after the collapse of treaty negotiations we cover in our analysis of the global plastics treaty, reinforced the sense of an industry exhaling. Both readings are true at once. The pledges weakened, and the purchases grew.

Why pledges flexed and mandates did not

The reset is best understood as a controlled experiment on the two kinds of rPET demand.

• Voluntary demand is priced against reputation. When virgin resin got cheap and recycled resin carried a premium, the implied cost of the pledges rose, and the pledges moved. That is what voluntary means.
• Mandated demand is priced against penalties. California's 25% requirement, rising to 50% by 2030 under the laws we examine in our review of SB 54 and AB 793, and the EU's 25%-to-30% bottle targets analyzed in our EU coverage, did not move a single percentage point through the entire pledge reset. They cannot. They are law.

For suppliers and buyers of recycled resin, the planning conclusion is clean: build volume forecasts on the mandate floor, and treat everything above it as upside that arrives when the commodity cycle permits. The floor alone is enormous, it is growing on a legislated calendar, and it is concentrated in exactly the food-grade, letter-backed material that is hardest to supply, the certification pathway we explain in our guide to the FDA letter of no objection.

Implications for the industry

For the recycling supply chain, the reset carries three practical messages. First, counterparty quality matters more than headline pledges: a contract with volume commitments beats a customer's press release every time. Second, the demand mix is shifting from reputational to regulatory, which favors suppliers who can document compliance-grade material, content percentages, chain of custody, food-contact clearance, over suppliers who can only offer green pounds. Third, the reuse retreat quietly reinforces recycled content: with reusable-packaging targets gone, single-use bottles remain the format of record, and their sustainability story now rests almost entirely on what they are made of.

There is also a warning in the reset for anyone upstream. Brands cited supply-side constraints, collection systems, EPR gaps, regional rPET prohibitions, as reasons for the retreat. Whether one reads that as explanation or excuse, it hands the industry its assignment: every improvement in collection and food-grade processing capacity removes an argument for the next downgrade.

A decade of pledges in three acts

The reset reads differently against the full arc of the voluntary era. Act one began around 2018, when the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Global Commitment gathered hundreds of brands behind shared 2025 targets and made packaging pledges a competitive arena; recycled-content promises escalated brand by brand, each announcement setting the bar for the next. Act two ran through the pandemic years, when ESG capital was abundant and ambition peaked: 50% recycled content by 2030 became the de facto standard for beverage majors, and reuse targets, always the hardest promise operationally, entered the frameworks. Act three is the one just concluded: the 2025 deadline year arrived, the gap between pledge and performance became unignorable, and the frameworks were rewritten to fit the trajectory rather than the aspiration.

Seen this way, the December 2024 and May 2025 announcements are not an anomaly but the scheduled end of a cycle that was always going to be marked to market. The useful question is what survives the cycle, and the answer is visible in the same reports: procurement infrastructure. The supplier relationships, qualification processes, and recycled-content lines built during the ambition years did not get un-built when the targets softened. Volume kept flowing. What died was the assumption that press-release percentages were a demand forecast.

Underwriting a customer's promise

For anyone selling into the packaging chain, the reset teaches a discipline borrowed from credit analysis: underwrite the promise, not the promiser. A brand target is bankable to the extent it is backed by three things. Contracted volumes, because a pledge that has not been converted into purchase agreements is a press strategy. Regulatory exposure, because a company selling heavily into California and the EU has mandate-driven demand that no board revision can cancel, the floor we map in our reviews of the California laws and the EU targets. And reported actuals, because a rising recycled-content percentage in audited sustainability reports is the one signal that survives every framework rewrite.

Applied to the current market, that underwriting yields a calm conclusion: the beverage majors remain, by an enormous margin, the largest and most reliable buyers of food-grade rPET on earth, because their regulatory exposure and their reported actuals both point the same direction their softened pledges do, upward, only slower. The reset changed the slope of the voluntary curve. It did not change the sign.

The numbers, side by side

For reference, the reset in one view. Coca-Cola: recycled material target moved from 50% by 2030 to a range of 35% to 40% by 2035; the 25% reusable-packaging goal for 2030, announced in 2022, no longer appears; the cumulative 3-million-metric-ton virgin reduction pledge for 2020 through 2025 was retired. PepsiCo: recycled plastic target moved from 50% by 2030 to 40% by 2035; the 20% reusable-servings goal ended; the company's stated obstacles were EPR coverage, India's 2023-vintage rPET permission, and China's continuing prohibition on food-grade recycled content. Against those revisions stand the operational actuals: PepsiCo reporting recycled content up 15% in 2024 with virgin use down 5%, and the US bottle fleet averaging 15.9% recycled content. Five years is the size of the deferral; the direction of actual purchasing did not reverse in either company's own accounting. That is the whole story in miniature, and it is why suppliers should read sustainability reports the way analysts read cash-flow statements: promises in the front, actuals in the back, and the back is the part that pays.

What to watch

Watch three things through 2026 and 2027. Whether the brands' reported recycled-content percentages keep climbing despite the softer targets, which would confirm the purchases-over-pledges reading. Whether the 2035 goals acquire interim milestones, the absence of which is the sharpest legitimate criticism of the reset. And whether regulators respond to the retreat by accelerating mandates, as several US states and the EU have signaled: nothing recruits legislators to binding targets like the visible flexing of voluntary ones.

The era in which corporate promises set the ceiling for recycled-content demand is over. The era in which law sets the floor has already begun, and the floor is rising on a schedule no press release can amend.