The South African Plastics Pact members are proud to publish the 2023 Annual Report! The report presents updated data from SA Plastics Pact members showing the collective progress towards a plastic packaging circular economy in South Africa. The collective progress of all members is compared against the 2025 targets.
In 2024, 80% of brand owners and retailers, 12 out of 15 organisations, reported on their 2023 packaging portfolio data, an increase from 53% for 2022 data, 77% for 2021 data and 75% for 2020 data.
Data was received from:
- All 6 retailer members
- 6 out of 9 brand owners
- 5 out of 8 label and packaging manufacturers
In 2023, SA Plastics Pact brand owners and retailers accounted for 209 300 tonnes of plastic packaging placed on the market in South Africa, which is approximately 24.3% of the locally filled plastic packaging placed on the market (Plastics SA, 2024).
As data quality has improved over the years and new members have joined, we have begun measuring members’ comparative progress based on their specific stages in the reporting journey.
This report presents both the collective progress of all members toward the targets as well as a classification of members across three distinct reporting categories. These classes relate to the first year that a full dataset was received from the respective members and allows for like-for-like comparison in target performance. We have termed these classifications as the Class of 2020, the Class of 2021 and the Class of 2023. This type of reporting highlights the positive progress made by the members that have been part of the initiative since inception, who have had the most opportunities for collaboration and learning from one another. Critically, this approach also means that new members can join at any stage, and will not be disadvantaged by not joining in from the beginning.
A high level summary of progress against the four targets is as follows:
Target 1:
- Members reduced the distrbution of straws by 91% or 24 million items since 2020
- Barrier bags reduced by 41%, from 91 million items in 2021 to 53 million items in 2023
- PVC rigid packaging has been reduced by 720 000 items, 59% lower than 2020
- Plastic cutlery has been reduced by 78% or 13 million items since 2020
Target 2:
- Class of 2020 achieved 81% recyclability in 2023, improving from 73% in 2020
- Class of 2021 improved from a 48% recyclability in 2022 to 52% in 2023
- Class of 2020 reduced multilayer multi-polymer packaging by 3000 tonnes from 2022 to 2023
- Recyclable PET increased by 11 000 tonnes from 2020 to 2023
Target 3:
- Significant increase in the recycling rate, with PET, HDPE, LDPE and PP packaging having greater than 7% year on year improvements
- LDPE has now overtaken PET as the best recycled packaging polymer in SA due to lower loss rates
- The PET recycling rate increased by 19% compared to 2022
- The recycling rate for all plastic materials has increased by 18% since 2020
- Output recycling rate: 45%
Target 4:
- Recycled content in PET packaging increased by 12 500 tonnes from 2020, and the recycled content percentage increased from 9.1 to 22.8% over the same time period
- Recycled content HDPE and LDPE increased by 6 300 tonnes from 2020, and from 4.8% to 14.5% in recycled content of PE packaging
- Class of 2020 achieved an average recycled content of 24% in 2023, up from 5% in 2020
- Brand owners used 11 000 tonnes more recycled content in PET in 2023 than in 2020
- Average recycled content: 18%
More information and progress can be obtain from the Annual Report which can be downloaded for free. Please note that two versions are provided. A version of two page spreads and a version with single pages. The latter version is better suited to mobile viewing.
The first version, below, is the two page spread option.
Below is the single page version of the report, best suited for mobile viewing.
