Walmart has never shied away from setting big, ambitious goals, whether it’s setting their sights on 100% renewable energy or their commitment to sustainable packaging, including a goal to achieve 100% recyclable, reusable or industrially compostable packaging by 2025.

Innovation is essential to achieving those goals and meeting customers’ growing expectation to buy sustainable/sustainably packaged products. Cue the Circular Connector: Launching yesterday, Walmart’s Circular Connector has been designed as an online tool to bridge the gap between companies searching for more sustainable packaging ideas and those that offer them.

In other words, it’s a platform that will aim to help accelerate packaging innovation and its implementation. Walmart wants to make it easier for sourcing teams and companies to quickly find sustainable packaging solutions – enabling the industry to move faster together on reducing waste from our communities, our oceans and our environment. And as you know, Walmart is all about driving efficiencies. With the Circular Connector, the retailer expects the journey to become easier to identify and implement more sustainable packaging solutions.

The Process

The Circular Connector is now available on WalmartSustainabilityHub.com for all packaging companies that are interested in submitting sustainable packaging solutions. To participate, innovations should align with Walmart’s sustainable packaging goals. Each submission will be screened against Walmart’s sustainable packaging goals, and if aligned, will be published later this year for public download on walmartsustainabilityhub.com, and made available to Walmart private brands associates and suppliers for their consideration.

Walmart’s Recycling Playbook provides examples of materials that are difficult to recycle and could disqualify innovations from inclusion in the Circular Connector. These materials include:

• Metallized films
• Multilayer materials
• PVC or PVDC
• EPS or PS
• PETG in rigid plastic packaging
• Oxo-degradable
• Undetectable carbon black
• Colored PET
• Biodegradable additives in petroleum-based plastics

Looking Ahead

Companies with reusable, refillable, recyclable and other sustainable packaging solutions, please share your innovations. There are hundreds of companies working toward sustainable packaging goals just like Walmart, and Circular Connector is yet another tool in that journey. It demonstrates Walmart’s commitment to make it easier for customers to make more sustainable choices, and for companies to choose sustainable packaging while lifting up the innovators and disrupting the status quo with solutions that can help us all toward a cleaner and more sustainable future.