IN Brief:
- PepsiCo reports a 6% year-on-year reduction in virgin plastic used for primary plastic packaging across key packaging markets.
- Recycled content in primary plastic packaging increased from 15% in 2024 to 18% in 2025.
- Lightweighting and redesign are reducing material inputs, while collection and recycling infrastructure remain constraints on further circularity.
PepsiCo reduced the absolute tonnage of virgin plastic used in primary plastic packaging across its key packaging markets by 6% between 2024 and 2025, while increasing recycled content from 15% to 18%.
The figures form part of PepsiCo’s latest environmental, social, and governance reporting, published on 13 August, and put measurable numbers against packaging changes being made across its beverage and convenient-food businesses. The company reports total plastic use of 2.0 million metric tonnes in its key packaging markets during 2025, including primary and secondary packaging.
PepsiCo also reports that 94% of its primary and secondary packaging in those markets was reusable, recyclable, or compostable by design in 2025. That figure was unchanged from the adjusted 2024 result and remains below the company’s target of at least 97% by 2030.
The distinction between design and actual material recovery is significant. A bottle or pack can be engineered to work within recycling systems, but its eventual recovery still depends on consumers, collection schemes, sorting infrastructure, recyclers, and markets for the recovered material. Packaging engineering can improve the first half of that chain; it cannot control all of the second.
PepsiCo’s 2025 activity includes lightweighting, format changes, greater use of recycled material, and work on flexible packaging. Across its North American beverage portfolio, the company says bottle lightweighting involving brands including Gatorade and Lipton reduced its plastic footprint by more than seven million pounds.
Less material still has to survive the line
Lightweighting is attractive because it can remove material without requiring a completely different packaging system, but it is not simply a matter of specifying a thinner bottle or film. A lighter package still has to tolerate forming, filling, sealing, conveying, packing, palletisation, transport, stacking, retail handling, and consumer use.
Removing too much material can create new losses if bottles deform, films tear, seals fail, or packs require additional secondary protection. Packaging teams therefore have to balance material reduction against mechanical performance, barrier requirements, line speed, product protection, and the probability of damage through the distribution chain.
In beverage manufacturing, bottle lightweighting can require changes to preform design, resin distribution, blow-moulding conditions, geometry, and handling equipment. Even a modest reduction in pack weight can affect how bottles behave through air conveyors, fillers, labellers, and case packers when line speeds are measured in hundreds of containers per minute.
Flexible food packaging presents a different engineering problem. Snack bags and similar formats often use multilayer structures to provide moisture, oxygen, light, grease, and sealing performance. Simplifying those materials to improve recyclability can be difficult if the replacement structure does not deliver the same shelf-life protection or machinability.
PepsiCo says it has continued moving selected Lay’s, Cheetos, and Hrusteam packaging in Russia towards monomaterial structures. In Australia, selected chip multipacks under brands including Smiths, Doritos, Twisties, and Cheetos were converted from plastic overwrap to paper boxes during 2025.
Recycled content depends on outside infrastructure
The increase from 15% to 18% recycled content in primary plastic packaging shows another route towards reducing virgin material demand. PepsiCo’s longer-term target is to reach at least 40% recycled content in primary plastic packaging across key packaging markets by 2035 or sooner.
That target depends heavily on the supply of suitable recycled polymers. Food and beverage packs need material that meets regulatory and performance requirements, while contaminants, colour, odour, mechanical properties, and processing behaviour can restrict the proportion of recovered plastic that can be returned to particular applications.
Collection systems therefore become part of the manufacturer’s packaging equation even though they sit downstream of production. Deposit-return schemes, extended producer responsibility programmes, sorting technology, and recycling capacity can affect the availability and price of recycled feedstock that converters and food manufacturers need to meet their own packaging specifications.
PepsiCo acknowledges that constraint in its reporting. The company says stronger collection, recycling, and composting systems are required to support circularity and continues to advocate for extended producer responsibility arrangements while participating in recycling initiatives across its key markets.
The UK provides one example of how those external systems interact with material choices. PepsiCo says Sunbites packaging continues to incorporate 50% recycled polypropylene using a mass-balance approach, while the company has also supported work around flexible-plastic collection. Flexible films remain considerably harder to recover at scale than established bottle streams, so material innovation and collection infrastructure have to advance together.
The 2025 figures should also be read within PepsiCo’s revised packaging targets. In 2025, the company moved from an earlier global virgin-plastic reduction goal to a target based on an average 2% annual reduction in absolute virgin-plastic tonnage for primary packaging across defined key markets. Those markets represented more than 80% of PepsiCo’s global plastic-packaging footprint by weight when the revised target was announced.
Against that measure, a 6% reduction in 2025 is ahead of the annual target rate, although one year’s performance does not determine whether the average can be maintained through 2030. Packaging volumes, product mix, resin availability, regulation, and market growth can all move the absolute figure in later years.
The more revealing point is that several parts of the packaging system are moving simultaneously. PepsiCo is using less virgin plastic in the measured primary-packaging scope, increasing recycled content, removing material through lightweighting, and redesigning selected formats.
None of those changes removes the harder infrastructure problem. A lighter or technically recyclable package only delivers circular value if there is a collection and processing route capable of recovering it. For manufacturers, packaging optimisation is therefore becoming a two-sided engineering problem: reduce and redesign what leaves the factory while operating within recycling systems that remain stubbornly uneven once the pack has left their control.
