The Mars company has announced plans to begin the switch to using more recycled plastic in pet food packaging in 2022.

Mars Petcare, the subsidiary of Mars Incorporated, which owns household brands such as Whiskas, Sheba, and Pedigree, has announced a new sustainable packaging partnership.

The pet food industry giant will team up with sustainable packaging company Huhtamaki and chemical company SABIC as part of a plan to reduce the company’s use of virgin plastics by 25% by 2025.

The new partnership will make use of SABIC’s ‘Trucircle’ plastics, which use previously hard-to-recycle plastics as their feedstock.

“Over the past year, we have been closely working with SABIC and Huhtamaki, continually testing-and-learning and scaling up the recycled plastic content in our petfood packs,” said Barry Parkin, Chief Procurement and Sustainability Officer at Mars Incorporated.

“As part of our Sustainable in a Generation plan, we are committed to doing our part to help drive a circular economy, which includes redesigning our packages for circularity.

“The fact that we are now able to introduce recycled content into our SHEBA pouches helps accelerate our journey to achieve 30% average recycled content in our plastic packaging and to reduce by 25% our use of virgin plastic.”

Pet food is usually difficult to manufacture with recycled plastics due to the high levels of heat which are used in manufacturing processes.

Huhtamaki claims their experience in the sustainable packaging field will help make the use of recycled plastics in pet food packaging possible.

Their technical expertise in formulating packaging elements such as easy-tear plastic films will also allow SABIC’s plastics to be used in wet pet food packaging.

“We are proud to work with Mars and SABIC on a concrete solution which can be used globally,” said Marco Hilty, President of Flexible Packaging at Huhtamaki.

“Successfully processing recycled polymers into high-quality, easy tear films for wet retort packaging at an industrial scale is a significant milestone in delivering on our ambition to have more than 80% of our raw materials renewable or recycled.”

The first packaging to be manufactured with the new recycled plastic is set to be for Sheba wet cat food, which will be available for purchase next year.