“At Mondelēz International, we strive to continuously improve our packaging and deliver on our long-term aim of advancing a circular packaging economy. We aim to design our packaging to be recyclable and to remove challenging materials.
Limited recycling collection exists for polystyrene in the U.S., and it can disrupt recycling streams for materials with higher recycling rates, like PET. By moving to PET plastic in our cookie trays, we aim to increase the recycling rate
for our packaging, and to improve the quality of recyclate in the PET stream.
Historically, we have used a high-impact polystyrene resin blend in our cookie trays for Oreo, Chips Ahoy!, Newtons, and Nutter Butter brands. Polystyrene has been known to have low recyclability rates in the U.S. To improve the opportunity for our cookie trays to be recycled, we underwent a largescale program to change these trays to PET.
This required significant investment in time and resources to qualify the new material across our entire production network. In 2022, we converted 5,970 metric tonnes of PS trays to PET thermoformed trays. These trays are made of high-quality PET resin with an intrinsic viscosity of >.72 and meet the APR guidelines for PET.”