Mexico recycler joins UN sustainable development effort

Mexican food-grade recycler PetStar SAPI de CV, owned by Coca-Cola México and six bottlers, is joining the United Nations' sustainable development efforts, hoping to inspire other companies to follow suit.

After launching a sustainable business model recently, which aims to recover and recycle all the PET bottles sent to market by its seven stakeholders by 2020, it is joining the management board of Global Pact Mexico for two years through May 2020.

According to the Geneva-based United Nations Environment Programme, France launched the Global Pact for the Environment initiative in September 2017.

The pact aims to build upon, among others, the Stockholm Declaration, the Rio Declaration, Rio+20, sustainable development goals, the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, which became effective in 2016.

The move "will allow the company to … participate more actively in building a culture of sustainability in line with the 2030 Agenda and the [U.N.'s] Sustainable Development Goals," Jesús González, the Mexican board's president, said May 29, announcing PetStar's incorporation at a PetStar sustainability forum in Mexico City.

The U.N. General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015. It includes 17 goals, such as eradicating poverty and hunger, developing responsible consumption and production and taking action on climate change.

"The goal … is to codify and unite the guiding principles of environmental law into a single text with legal force," the Environment Programme states on its website.

"Currently we are collecting 70 percent of the bottles sent to market," company founder and CEO Jaime Cámara Creixell told Plastics News in a December 2016, interview when asked about PetStar's sustainable business model.

Speaking at the May 29 forum, he said the company he founded in 2006 and which he believes is the largest recycler of food-grade PET anywhere, hopes to "inspire others to execute actions against the enormous environmental challenge that we face in the years leading up to 2030."