P&G backs Recycling Participation Fund as EPR pressures rise
This move is made in partnership with four other major corporate partners, including Arconic, Milliken & Company Charitable Foundation, Niagara Cares, and Primo Brands.
USA – Procter & Gamble has backed The Recycling Partnership’s newly launched Recycling Participation Fund to eliminate everyday barriers that prevent people from recycling and to strengthen confidence in local recycling programs across the United States.
The initiative draws on more than a decade of resident insight, field data, and real-world testing to deliver stronger recycling outcomes, addressing a critical problem: even in communities with established recycling programs, more than 50% of recyclable material is lost inside homes before it ever enters the recycling system, making resident participation the most urgent and underdeveloped opportunity for improving recycling rates.
The fund launches at a pivotal moment as Extended Producer Responsibility laws are being implemented across seven U.S. states, creating growing pressure to meet ambitious recycling performance targets that infrastructure improvements alone cannot achieve.
On the other hand, for producers like P&G, it offers a practical way to invest in community-level conditions needed to improve recycling outcomes rather than relying solely on infrastructure.
Cody Marshall, Chief Recycling Officer of The Recycling Partnership, stated, “As the leading organization that has been on the ground gathering deep, scientific, system-level data on household recycling behaviour, we are uniquely positioned to use this pivotal funding to accelerate the time it takes to achieve next-level recycling rates.”
The Recycling Partnership has demonstrated that progress is possible through more than 200 behavior-focused projects, including a nearly USD 9 million investment in Michigan partnered with MI EGLE that boosted the state’s recycling rate from 14% to 25%, surpassing the national average, and the organization has captured robust data from these projects with long-standing support from the Milliken & Company Charitable Foundation, the Walmart Foundation, and Niagara Cares.
Through the new fund, The Recycling Partnership will leverage research to advance understudied solutions, test new strategies to accelerate recycling participation, focus on California, Texas, Arkansas, and other priority regions, and deploy 10 community programs on the ground within the first year.
The urgency of this initiative is underscored by current U.S. recycling statistics: only 21% of residential recyclable materials are actually recycled, 76% end up in the trash at home, and only 43% of U.S. households actively recycle, despite 73% having access to recycling services.
This fund aligns with P&G’s broader sustainability goals, including its “Ambition 2030” pledge to reduce virgin plastic use by 50% and achieve 100% recyclability or reusability by 2030.
The Recycling Partnership, a U.S. nonprofit that collectively solves recycling’s toughest challenges, has recovered more than 2 billion pounds of new recyclables and avoided 2.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions since 2014.
The organization has also delivered more than 2 million recycling carts to U.S. homes and catalyzed USD 658 million in recycling system improvements.
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