Cadbury Launches 80% Recycled Plastic Packaging

Mondelēz International is rolling out 80% certified recycled plastic packaging for Cadbury sharing bars sold in the British Isles. Starting this year, the brand owner is phasing in the packaging for bars made in Bournville, England, and Coolock, Ireland.

Ultimately, the equivalent of about 600 tonnes/661 tons of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic will be used to package approximately 300 million sharing bars annually.

Mondelēz collaborated with Amcor and Jindal Films to develop the new packaging, which is recycle-ready and incorporates Amcor’s AmFiniti recycled plastic.

The 80% recycled packaging positions the brand well in a regulatory environment that’s encouraging recycling and recycled content via rules like the European Union’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).

The recycled content in the new Cadbury packaging is made using advanced recycling technology — aka chemical recycling — rather than mechanical recycling. Thus the packaging material is safe for food-contact applications.

“With current technology, the PCR polyolefin resins produced by mechanical recycling are generally not pure enough to be approved for use in food and healthcare primary packaging in Europe,” says Gerald Rebitzer, senior director of sustainability and public affairs for Amcor.

Advanced recycling reduces post-consumer plastic to its chemical building blocks. “The resulting PCR resins … have the same purity and properties as virgin plastic resin,” Rebitzer says. Therefore, “it can be used in applications such as flexible food-contact packaging, where mechanically recycled content has limitations today.”

Continued migration to mass balance.
Mondelēz is using the mass balance approach to account for the proportion of recycled plastic in the Cadbury sharing-bar packaging material, which is certified 80% recycled plastic through International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) PLUS.

With mass balance and advanced recycling, it’s not possible to identify the amount of recycled plastic in the individual package wrappers, if any, “but you can show how much recycled feedstock in used, on average,” Rebitzer says.

According to Mondelēz, the new Cadbury sharing-bar packaging has the highest percentage of recycled flexible plastic of all Cadbury packaging globally.

The sharing-bar wrappers are also the first of Cadbury’s to call out the recycled content percentage on the package. The front-of-pack statement reads, in part, “Wrapped in 80% Recycled Plastic/Recycle Me Again.”

A QR code on the back of the wrapper gives consumers access to a new digital platform that explains mass balance in plain language and describes Cadbury’s sustainable packaging efforts. The platform’s resources include the Recycle Now recycling locator from United Kingdom-based Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP).

Cadbury’s 80% recycled packaging expands on the brand’s rollout in 2022 of 30% certified recycled plastic packaging for 110-gram Cadbury Dairy Milk and Cadbury Mini Snowballs sharing bars in the United Kingdom and Ireland. That packaging was also ISCC-certified using mass balance.

Additionally, Mondelēz is leveraging advanced recycling and mass balance to drive packaging sustainability in the United States and Canada, where it recently introduced Triscuit bag-in-box plastic liners made from up to 50% ISCC PLUS-certified recycled plastic.