Restaurant Brands International: Sustainable Packaging Policies for Plastics
WHEREAS: The growing plastic pollution crisis poses increasing risks to our company. Corporations that use plastic packaging could collectively face an annual financial risk of approximately $100 billion should governments require them to cover the waste management costs of the packaging they use, a policy that is increasingly being enacted around the globe.
Pew Charitable Trusts released a groundbreaking study, Breaking the Plastic Wave (Pew Report), concluding that if all current industry and government commitments were met, ocean plastic deposition would be reduced by only 7%. Without immediate and sustained new commitments throughout the plastics value chain, annual flows of plastics into oceans could nearly triple by 2040.
The Pew report also finds that improved recycling must be coupled with reductions in use, materials redesign, and substitution. It concludes that plastic demand should be reduced by at least 1/3, stating that reducing plastic production is the most attractive solution from environmental, economic, and social perspectives.
The European Union has already banned 10 single-use plastic products commonly found in ocean cleanups and enacted a $1/kg tax on non-recycled plastic packaging waste.
Restaurant Brands International (RBI) is part of a “to go” packaging culture, contributing to plastic pollution of land and water through its disposable packaging. Burger King India has banned all single-use plastics and RBI’s Tim Horton’s has phased out some plastic packaging, demonstrating the viability of moving toward plastic-free meal delivery. To reduce plastic use, RBI should position the company to shift permanently away from single-use packaging and towards reusable containers at all brand locations. The company could achieve this by setting dates by which its reusable packaging endeavors will move beyond pilot stages.
Competitor Starbucks is shifting away from single-use packaging and developing new, global reusable container goals, which could reduce plastic use by thousands of tons.
Unilever has taken the most significant corporate action to date, agreeing to cut virgin plastic packaging by 50% by 2025, including absolute elimination of 100,000 tons of plastic packaging. At least seventeen other consumer goods companies have virgin plastic reduction goals, including Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestlé, and Target. RBI has no virgin plastic reduction goal.
BE IT RESOLVED: Shareholders request that the RBI Board issue a report, at reasonable expense and excluding proprietary information, describing how the company could reduce its plastics use in alignment with the 1/3 reduction findings of the Pew Report, or other authoritative sources, to successfully reduce the majority of ocean plastics pollution.
SUPPORTING STATEMENT: The report should, at Board discretion:
Quantify the weight of total plastic packaging used by the company;
Evaluate the benefits of dramatically reducing the amount of plastics used in our packaging;
Assess the reputational, financial, and operational risks associated with continuing to use substantial amounts of plastic packaging while plastic pollution grows unabated; and
Describe any necessary reduction strategies or goals, materials redesign, transition to reusables goals, substitution, or reductions in use of virgin plastic
Resolution Details
Company: Restaurant Brands International
Lead Filers:
As You Sow
Year: 2022
Filing Date:
December 2021
Initiative(s): Consumer Packaging
Status: Withdrawn