Circular Manufacturing
Committed to a circular economy that diverts used packaging and operational waste from landfills, preserves resources, and reduces the use of virgin materials through downgauging and by increasing recycled content, further reducing our products’ impact on the environment.
Highlights
- At Greif, we have been incorporating recycled materials into our products for decades. Our Build to Last strategy demonstrates our commitment to being industry leaders in circularity.
- Advancing our product sustainability initiatives was a leading focus in 2024, particularly by creating opportunities to use post-consumer resin (PCR) and improving the recyclability of our plastic containers. Our innovative barrier coating technologies for plastic containers prevent the loss of our customers’ products while protecting the container from contamination.
- We create value for our customers by offering a broad suite of solutions that help them meet their sustainability goals.
- We continue to monitor the evolving regulatory landscape and are preparing to align our sustainability targets with new regulations as they emerge, including the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR and Waste Framework Directive).
- In 2025, we expect to refine our sustainability targets based on an updated baseline, where circular manufacturing will play a key role in achieving our goals.
Why Circular Manufacturing Matters
Our Build to Last strategy and business model are rooted in circular economy principles. With our extensive expertise, legendary customer service, global reach, and diverse portfolio of solutions, we are uniquely positioned to deliver innovative, sustainable, and circular products and services. Circular manufacturing is central to our efforts to meet our customers’ needs today while preparing for the future as they navigate regulatory changes, shifting consumer trends, and ambitious sustainability goals. Advancing the circular economy is essential for our business growth, colleague engagement, talent attraction, and environmental impact.
Collaboration across value chains is critical to driving a circular economy. We strive to maximize waste diversion, material recovery, and value creation for our suppliers and customers. By promoting recycled content, collecting end-of-life containers, and forming strategic partnerships, we deliver sustainable solutions that drive mutual success. Reconditioning, recycling, and increasing recycled content throughout the product life cycle reduce resource consumption, minimize waste, and lower carbon emissions.
Our Approach
Our circular economy strategy emphasizes a cradle-to-cradle approach, advancing five key circular economy principles:
- Reduction of virgin raw material use.
- Waste reduction and minimizing natural resource use.
- Innovation and increasing recyclability, and use of recycled materials.
- Fiber-based alternatives to single-use plastics.
- Life cycle services including the collection, reconditioning, and recycling of used products.
Advancing circularity is a shared responsibility across our business and enabling functions. For example, our supply chain team integrates circularity objectives into key procurement categories like resin and steel, while sourcing managers explore innovative projects and new supply sources. These efforts embed circular principles into daily operations and help us achieve our 2030 circularity goals.
Reducing reliance on virgin raw materials is a cornerstone of our strategy. Lightweighting, downgauging, and prioritizing recycled materials are integral to our product design process. For instance, our EcoBalance product line incorporates up to 100 percent recycled high-density polyethylene sourced from post-consumer containers. Collaboration with customers and suppliers promotes the adoption of recycled and recyclable products, thereby aligning sustainability and business success.
We detail our approach and progress towards becoming a zero waste-to-landfill organization in the Waste section of this report.
Product Portfolio
We offer packaging solutions for essential industries, including agriculture, agrochemicals, specialty chemicals, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and more. Our solutions embrace circular economy principles:
- Sustainable Fiber Solutions: Our vertically integrated solutions through the fiber packaging value chain demonstrate a circular economy. Our paper packaging solutions include fiber drums, tubes and cores, partitions, paperboard and containerboard, and corrugated products. We also develop products that replace single-use plastics with fiber-based alternatives. In 2024, 71 percent of all fiber products manufactured were sourced from recycled materials. Our Recycled Materials Group collected 3.4 million metric tons of fiber, of which 41 percent was then processed by Greif mills to produce paperboard for our paper packaging solutions.
Greif EnviroRAP
Greif EnviroRAP is 100 percent recycled paperboard with an innovative water-based, recyclable, and repulpable poly-alternative coating.
- Durable Metal Solutions: Steel drums are a sustainable packaging solution due to their infinite recyclability. They can even be reconditioned and reused multiple times before recycling. In 2024, our Life Cycle Services (LCS) network reconditioned and sold more than 1.2 million steel drums. We manufactured new steel products with approximately 5-30 percent recycled content, depending on the region.
Greif Light Steel Drum
The Greif Light Steel Drum is a high-performance lightweight drum with a unique design that reduces the carbon footprint compared to a standard drum.
- Customized Polymer Solutions: Our polymer solutions, including plastic drums, jerrycans, and intermediate bulk containers (IBCs) are lightweight, durable, and high performing. Our plastic packaging products are fully recyclable, supported by our comprehensive suite of barrier protection alternatives. Additionally, we reconditioned more than 1 million IBCs and 322,000 plastic drums.
GCUBE IBC
Greif offers the GCUBE IBC that can be made from Post Consumer Resin (PCR) generated from the collection of empty IBCs.
Life Cycle Services
- Steel and Plastic: Our LCS network provides access to used steel, plastic, and paper products that reduce demand for virgin raw materials. In North America and Europe, we collect and recondition used steel, plastic, and IBC packaging products, making them suitable for reuse and resale. In 2024, our LCS network collected 3.6 million containers, reconditioned or remanufactured more than 2.6 million of these containers and recycled the remaining containers.
- Fiber: Greif’s Recycled Materials Group (RMG) serves as a commercial and industrial recycling partner, recycling all forms of paper and select plastics in the U.S. In 2024, RMG collected 3.4 million metric tons of material, with 41 percent used in our paper products and 59 percent sold to external mills. 86 percent of the fiber used in our paper manufacturing at our mills is sourced from recycled materials. We are a net positive recycler and a key player in the paper recycling industry.
Navigating Regulatory Landscapes
We proactively monitor evolving regulations related to circularity and waste. In 2024, we collaborated with trade associations and industry groups to stay informed, advocate for practical sustainability measures, and share insights. As new regulatory requirements emerge, we plan to refine our sustainability targets to ensure alignment. Circular manufacturing will remain central to achieving these targets.
Goals, Progress, & Performance
2030 Goals:
- Make 100 percent of Greif products recyclable1.
- Achieve an average of 60 percent recycled raw material content across our products2.
- Recover an average of 80 percent as much material from the market as we ship to the market3.
We have made significant strides towards achieving our 2030 goals, particularly within our Sustainable Fiber Solutions segment. Approximately 99 percent of our fiber solution products are recyclable and, on average, are made from 71 percent recycled content. Additionally, our RMG group collects 246% of the volume of fiber products that we sell.
We are tagging products appropriately across various systems to monitor recycled content and material recovery accurately as we progress toward our goals. In 2025, this process includes automating data collection and management activities to drive operational efficiencies and real-time data availability.
Across our Customized Polymer Solutions segment we are focused on a thorough review of sourcing, equipment, and technical capabilities to evaluate our capacity to increase PCR usage within our products.
We are working towards building a global network of material recovery solutions to reach our 2030 goals while growing our global reconditioning network. In November 2024, we acquired a majority stake in Delta Containers Manchester in the United Kingdom to expand and enhance our Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) reconditioning and recycling services across the UK and Ireland. In December 2024, through our subsidiary Centurion Container LLC, we acquired the operations of Enterprize Container Corporation (“Enterprize”). Enterprize is an industrial reconditioner in Tennessee, U.S. that provides reconditioned and rebottled IBCs as well as reconditioned plastic drums.
[1] Working across a vast portfolio of raw materials and products, our recyclability targets will be benchmarked by weight, consolidated at a company level.
[2] Recycled content targets for our products are minimum averages, benchmarked across a portfolio of materials and products by weight, consolidated at a company level.
[3] Recovery targets for Greif products are minimum averages benchmarked across a portfolio of materials and products by weight, consolidated at a company level.
Using Recycled Plastic in IBC Molding
Greif’s Tri-Sure facility in Carol Stream collaborated with GIP North America purchasing, GIP Italy and four GIP NA plants to source 800,000 pounds of recycled plastic resins to use in the production of IBC rear/corner feet and corner protectors. This internal sourcing strategy reduced costs by $100,000. The team also reused empty corrugated bulk boxes to ship the recycled products they manufacture, reducing corrugated bulk box purchases by 84 percent. The project created company value and established environmental and financial benefits, while closing two internal loop systems and contributing to circular economy principles by diverting waste from landfills and finding a new purpose for them. Due to the outstanding sustainability impact of the project and its ability to be scaled to other molding and injection molding facilities, the project and Tri-Sure Carol Stream team was awarded the Michael J. Gasser Sustainability Award.
Reconditioning Conical Drums in Portugal
For the past 20 years Greif’s RIPS facility in Iberia, Portugal has been supplying customers with reconditioned conical drums, having reconditioned over 10 million drums and saving 50,000 tons of steel, 197,600 tonnes of CO2 emissions, 2,600,000 gigajoules of energy and 343,200 cubic meters of water in the process. The project was initially started as a way to help address our customers’ wish to reduce waste and lower their carbon footprint and overall improve customer satisfaction. The team collaborated with customers to understand their needs, including volume, specification requirements and safety, developed a reconditioning process and ultimately installed a reconditioning line to begin serving customers. Today, the facility serves a multitude of customers, reconditioning 500,000 conical drums and saving 5,200 tons of steel each year.
Expanding Cradle to Cradle Services with Investments and Joint Ventures
In recent years, Greif has made investments and established multiple joint ventures in order to expand the scale and capabilities of the reuse, recycling, and reconditioning services we provide. After acquiring a minority stake in 2020, Greif has continued its investment in Centurion Container LLC, owning 80% of the company as of April 2023, to expand our intermediate bulk container (IBC) reconditioning network in North America. After beginning a joint venture with Delta Plastics, the leading independent supplier of reconditioned IBCs in the United Kingdom, in 2020, Greif completed full-acquisition in November of 2024. Additionally, in December of 2020, Greif acquired a minority stake in LAF s.r.l., expanding IBC reconditioning services for our Italy-based customers. We look forward to working with our partners to continue to reduce our environmental impact through cradle-to-cradle solutions.
State of the Art Reconditioning Services in Lille
Greif’s LCS facility in Lille, France has taken significant steps to innovate the logistics associated with offering reconditioning services to our customers. Traditionally, empty IBCs were picked up from and delivered to a single location for a single customer. LCS Lille has begun picking up from locations along our customers supply chain, then delivering reconditioned IBCs back to our customers, simplifying logistics for our customers. Lille has also implemented Datamatrix, a traceability system that allows us to record all production steps from reception to delivery, have visibility into the origins of an IBC and provide a real time view of our inventory in support of overall enhanced customer service. Datamatrix also supports better management of residue in the IBCs they collect. Each IBC that enters the facility is automatically weighed to determine how much residue is in the container and inform how it is treated. With Datamatrix, this information can be sent directly back to customers to improve how they manage IBCs that are ready for pick-up. Lille uses a closed loop water system for water that is used to clean IBCs recycling 100 percent of the water they use, and collects, treats and shreds plastic that is used to manufacture new IBCs and plastic drums.
Providing Our Customers a Circular Solution
The CorrChoice GreenGuard® product line provides our customers with a food safe recyclable and repulpable alternative to supplemental materials, such as plastic liners. Our GreenGuard® line of paper coatings are safe for direct contact with most food types and feature oil, grease, water, moisture and abrasion resistance as well as an innovative wax replacement technology. By applying the coating to corrugated containers, we eliminate the need for supplemental materials used in many food applications. We work with our customers to ensure our products meet their needs for safe and secure food handling while providing packaging products that are 100% recyclable and repulpable, advancing our circular economy strategy while enabling our customers to meet their sustainability objectives.
