New Upstream Innovation guide by The Ellen MacArthur Foundation offers practical solutions to the plastic pollution crisis

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has published Upstream Innovation: A guide to packaging solutions, a practical guide to eliminating plastic pollution through circular economy solutions.

The guide is accompanied by a host of assets including a case study database, a workshop toolkit, videos and more, created by the Foundation’s New Plastics Economy innovation team to help anyone involved in packaging creation to develop upstream solutions that prevent plastic waste and pollution.

The Upstream Innovation guide’s release comes just weeks after the Foundation, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme, published its second New Plastics Economy Global Commitment Progress Report, which made it clear that businesses would need to step up their elimination and reuse efforts if they were to meet their 2025 targets to address plastic pollution.

The Foundation believes by focusing more of their efforts on upstream innovation – rather than just downstream activity such as waste management – businesses can prevent waste from ever being created.

Topics in the guide include, the mindset needed for upstream innovation, examples and guidance on applying upstream innovation to achieve three circular economy strategies -  Elimination, Reuse, and Material Circulation, along with guidance on how to support and make decisions throughout the upstream innovation process.

More than 110 examples, including from Tesco, Lush, Walmart, and Abel & Cole, demonstrate how businesses around the world are using circular economy solutions across a range of sectors.

Sara Wingstrand, Innovation Programme Manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, said: “We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis, we need to move upstream and look at what is put on the market in the first place, so we can eliminate waste, not simply manage it better. The circular economy allows us to redesign the entire plastics system to not only overcome the global challenge of plastic pollution, but to do so in a way that allows us to build better growth and create solutions at speed and scale. Designers and businesses are at the heart of this transition and we hope this guide will help them on that journey.”