The Ellen MacArthur Foundation works on the circular economy: designing waste out of systems rather than managing it afterwards. On plastics it runs the Global Commitment, through which more than 1,200 companies, governments and other organisations have signed up to targets on reducing, reusing and recycling packaging, and it publishes an annual progress report, most recently in November 2025. Its audience is the consumer-goods industry and policy-makers rather than restaurants, which is why this page sits under organisations.
Unlocking a Reuse Revolution
The foundation's 2023 analysis of returnable packaging is the document most often cited when a city or a company is deciding whether a reuse system can work at scale. It models the economics and environmental impact of returnable systems across sectors and sets out what has to be true for them to beat single-use: high return rates, pooled infrastructure and standardised containers. A shorter insights summary accompanies it.
Why it matters here
A restaurant's returnable-container scheme lives or dies on the same three conditions, and the PR3 standards described on the returnable-systems page exist to deliver the third. For an organisation weighing an investment in local reuse infrastructure, the foundation's work is the starting point.