PSC engages pet industry leaders

The Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC) and Hill’s Pet Nutrition announced the formation of the Pet Specialty Store-Drop-Off (SDO) Action Collaborative. This initiative brings pet industry leaders together to tackle one of the pet industry's most significant environmental challenges: flexible plastic pet food packaging. The group aims to provide a means to reduce plastic waste destined for landfills and a way for pet industry companies to improve their overall environmental footprint if they choose to participate in the initiative, according to a media release.

Flexible packaging represents a complex waste challenge for the industry. Because many pet food bags are made of multiple, fused layers of material, they are not accepted in most curbside recycling programs and the vast majority end up in landfills. This collaborative seeks to create a viable end-of-life solution for this waste stream.

For participating pet retailers across the United States, this means implementing an effective store drop-off collection system where their customers can conveniently return empty pet food bags to be kept out of the landfill. To be successful, this collection system for flexible plastic pet food bags must be verified and scalable. This work builds on PSC's previous packaging pilots, including the ‘Flex Forward’ program in 2020, to create a solution.

PSC announced the following companies participating in designing this voluntary program: for brands: Hill’s Pet Nutrition, for retailers: PetSmart and Petco; and for packaging innovators: Peel Plastics and Morris Packaging.

‘This new SDO Action Collaborative is designed to leverage collective power,’ said Allison Reser, Director of Sustainability and Innovation at PSC. ‘The group will design the program and generate rigorous, verifiable data. This data is the key: it has the potential to demonstrate the viability of diverting flexible film packaging from landfills and the capability to be widely recyclable under emerging EPR laws.’

Ana Gensini, senior director of global packaging at Hill’s Pet Nutrition, said: ‘Our role as a founding member is to provide the leadership, resources and commitment necessary to establish a scalable, verified collection system for pet food bags across the pet specialty channel.’

The SDO Action Collaborative will focus on the key objectives: Design a scalable SDO program, generate verifiable data, and foster strategic industry collaboration. The core membership for the SDO Action Collaborative is set. However, the next phase—the pilot program implementation—requires significant action beyond planning. PSC is looking at which companies may be willing to engage operational resources across these critical areas: Financial support; pet specialty retailers willing to dedicate space in-store or in parking lots for collection bins; distributors, logistics firms, and collectors willing to manage the cost-effective pickup, transport, and aggregation of collected material; and recyclers and end-market innovators willing to commit to accepting and processing the specialized flexible film material.

Interested parties willing to support the future pilot implementation are encouraged to contact Allison Reser to learn more: packaging@petsustainability.org.