Pepsi is estimated to produce approximately 5 million metric tonnes of waste in 2026 (11 billion pounds), counting the waste from PepsiCo's own factories and warehouses plus the plastic packaging they put on shop shelves worldwide.
Those two halves are close to the same size, and neither is falling by much. One is measured every year. The other has not been updated since 2023.
PepsiCo call their sustainability plan pep+, and recycled plastic has genuinely risen from 3% to 18%. The total behind it has barely moved, at roughly 5 million tonnes in 2026, and in May 2025 they loosened almost every packaging target.
Pepsi's annual waste totals (2023-2026)
PepsiCo report the two sides of their footprint in different places and on different schedules. The table below adds them together, starting from the last year both sides were reported.
| Year | Total waste (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 4,970,000 | -1% |
| 2025 | 5,040,000 | -2% |
| 2024 | 5,155,000 | - |
| 2023 | 5,154,000 | baseline |
Note: The factory side is PepsiCo's own 2023 figure, the most recent they have published, held flat for later years because their sales volumes have been flat too.
The packaging side comes from their annual disclosures to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Together the two give roughly 4,970,000 tonnes for 2026.
What the table shows is a footprint that is close to standing still. Four years of targets, redesigns and recycled-content projects have taken about 3% off the combined number.
PepsiCo's sales grew over the same period, from $91.5 billion in 2023 to $93.9 billion in 2025, so the waste is not falling because the company is shrinking.
The two halves behind the total
The two streams are worth separating, because they are measured to very different standards.
| Waste stream | 2026 tonnes | Last reported by PepsiCo |
|---|---|---|
| Factory and warehouse waste | 2,600,000 | 2023 |
| Plastic packaging sold | 2,370,000 | 2025 |
Note: The factory figure is what PepsiCo generate inside their own operations. The packaging figure is what they place on the market and hand to the customer, which becomes waste after the drink is drunk or the crisps are eaten.
The two streams are held to different standards. PepsiCo's packaging numbers are refreshed every year and independently assured, while their factory waste page still carries a 2023 figure and was last updated in June 2024.
Why the packaging figure looks like it fell
Anyone reading PepsiCo's disclosures year on year will see plastic packaging drop from 2,554,000 tonnes in 2023 to 2,095,000 in 2024, which looks like an 18% cut in a single year.
That fall is a change in what gets counted rather than a change in the plastic. In May 2025 PepsiCo narrowed what they report to their "key packaging markets", a scope their own footnote describes as more than 80% of their worldwide plastic packaging by weight.
The arithmetic lines up with that scope. The 2024 figure is 82% of the 2023 figure, and scaling it back up to a worldwide basis returns 2,555,000 tonnes, which is the 2023 number almost exactly.
Every comparable company moved by only a few percent that year. Coca-Cola went up 4.6%, Nestlé down 2.7%, Unilever down 2.2%. A genuine 18% fall at PepsiCo alone would have been extraordinary, and it did not happen.
Who actually makes Pepsi
Most people picture a blue can, but the company behind it is a food business first. PepsiCo own Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos and Quaker alongside Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew and Gatorade, and the snack brands bring in more money than the drinks.
That changes what the waste is made of. A bottle is a single lump of clear plastic that recyclers want. A crisp packet is a thin laminated film that almost nobody can recycle.
The numbers behind the company, from their 2025 annual report, set the scale.
- Net revenue of $93.9 billion in 2025, up from $91.9 billion the year before.
- Around 306,000 employees worldwide, about 125,000 of them in the United States.
- Products sold in more than 200 countries and territories.
- Six operating regions, of which the biggest single one is North American drinks.
How Pepsi compares with Coca-Cola and Nestlé
PepsiCo sit second among the world's consumer-goods companies for plastic packaging, behind Coca-Cola and well ahead of everyone else.
| Company | Plastic packaging in 2024 | What their figure covers |
|---|---|---|
| Coca-Cola | 3,606,000 | Consumer-facing primary packaging, about 90% of their plastic |
| PepsiCo | 2,095,000 | Key packaging markets, more than 80% of their plastic |
| Nestlé | 873,000 | The full portfolio |
| Unilever | 655,000 | 27 markets, about 82% of their plastic |
| Mars | 215,000 | The full portfolio |
Note: Figures as reported to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitment for 2024. The right-hand column matters, because three of these five companies report on a trimmed-down scope rather than their whole business.
Set against revenue, PepsiCo use less plastic than Coca-Cola. They use roughly 27 tonnes for every million dollars of sales, against about 77 tonnes for Coca-Cola.
A bag of crisps earns more per gram of packaging than a bottle of soft drink does, so a company that is half snacks carries a lighter packaging load for the same money.
Where the factory waste comes from
The 2.6 million tonnes from PepsiCo's own sites is mostly not plastic. It is food. Potato peel, corn residue, spent oil, sludge from washing and processing, plus the products that get damaged or go out of date before they are sold.
PepsiCo sort it into four groups.
- Raw material waste, meaning obsolete packaging and ingredients that never make it into a product.
- Manufacturing waste, created when a production line is disrupted or a batch fails a quality check.
- Warehouse waste, covering goods damaged or expired in storage.
- Sales waste, from breakage, expiry and relabelling out in the market.
Because so much of it is organic, most of it can be sent somewhere useful. PepsiCo's own waste reporting puts the amount diverted from landfill in 2023 at over 2.5 million tonnes, or 98% of the total, through recycling, composting and waste-to-energy partners.
Hazardous material is under 1% of the whole stream, which is what you would expect from a business whose main inputs are potatoes, corn, oats and sugar.
Some of it is turned back into fuel. At their plant in Carregado, Portugal, potato peel, unusable food and sludge are digested into biogas that replaces natural gas, a project expected to handle over 20,000 tonnes of organic material.
PepsiCo's waste page says they are "working toward achieving a 99% diversion rate by 2025". That deadline has now passed, and no result against it has been published.
The crisp packet problem
A Pepsi bottle and a Doritos bag are both plastic, but only one of them has a recycling route. The bag is flexible film, thin layers of different plastics and often aluminium bonded together to keep the contents dry and fresh.
Those layers are exactly what makes it hard to recycle. Separating bonded materials costs more than the recovered plastic is worth, so most kerbside schemes will not take them and the packet is burned or buried.
The same applies to sachet packaging, the small single-serving packets PepsiCo sell in large volumes across South Asia, Africa and Latin America. They are cheap, they reach low-income customers, and they are close to unrecyclable.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation are blunt about what this means for the industry as a whole. Across all the companies reporting to them, small-format flexible packaging grew 17% between 2020 and 2023, and they state that the 100% recyclable goal cannot be reached without tackling it.
How much of Pepsi's plastic is recycled
This is where PepsiCo have real progress to show. The share of recycled material in their plastic packaging has risen steadily, while the amount of new fossil-based plastic has started to come down.
| Year | Recycled content | Virgin plastic against baseline |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 21% | Down 5% on the year before |
| 2025 | 18% | Down 6% on the year before |
| 2024 | 15% | Down 5% on the year before |
| 2023 | 10% | Up 6% on 2020 |
| 2022 | 7.3% | Up 10% on 2020 |
| 2020 | 3% | Baseline year |
Note: Figures from PepsiCo's packaging disclosures and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The measuring basis changed in 2025, so the 2024 onward rows track year-on-year change while earlier rows compare against the 2020 baseline.
The 2026 row is ours, carrying forward the three to five point annual gain of the last two years. Every other row is reported.
Recycled content going from 3% to 18% in five years is a genuine achievement, and it is harder for a food and drink company than for most. Recycled plastic that touches food has to meet a higher safety bar, which is why food-grade recyclate is scarcer and dearer than the ordinary kind.
The catch is that recycled content changes what the plastic is made of, not how much of it there is. A bottle with 50% recycled material weighs the same as one made from new plastic, and becomes waste at the same moment.
The targets PepsiCo loosened in 2025
On 22 May 2025 PepsiCo reset their packaging goals. Some deadlines moved out, some numbers came down, and one target was dropped altogether.
The company described the changes as a response to external barriers, including the slow build-out of recycling infrastructure in the markets where they sell.
| Goal | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Virgin plastic | Cut 20% by 2030 | Cut 2% a year to 2030 |
| Recycled content | 50% by 2030 | 40% by 2035 or sooner |
| Reusable packaging | 20% of drink servings by 2030 | Dropped |
| Recyclable by design | 100% by 2025 | 97% by 2030 |
Note: The 99% landfill diversion goal for 2025 was not restated in the new set, and no result against it has been published.
The reuse target is the one that drew most criticism. Refillable and returnable packaging is the only approach on the list that cuts the amount of packaging rather than improving what it is made of.
What PepsiCo say about their record
PepsiCo published their latest results on 13 August 2026 and point to progress on several fronts. Recycled plastic reached 18%, virgin plastic fell 6% in a year, and 94% of their packaging is now designed to be recyclable, reusable or compostable.
Outside the company the reading is harsher. As You Sow, the shareholder advocacy group, called the decision to drop the reuse goal an opportunistic move in a deregulating political environment, and said it abandoned the hard work needed to tackle plastic pollution.
The litter counts tell their own story. In the 2023 global brand audit run by Break Free From Plastic, volunteers sorted 537,719 pieces of plastic waste across 41 countries, and PepsiCo-branded items outnumbered Coca-Cola's for the first time.
PepsiCo still finished fourth in that ranking rather than first, because the audit weights how widely a brand is found. Their waste turned up in 30 countries against Coca-Cola's 40.
Frequently asked questions about Pepsi's waste
Below are the seven questions readers most often ask about how much waste Pepsi produces.
How much waste does Pepsi produce each year?
About 5 million metric tonnes in 2026. Roughly 2.6 million tonnes comes from PepsiCo's factories and warehouses, and about 2.4 million tonnes is the plastic packaging they sell to customers.
Is Pepsi the same company as PepsiCo?
Pepsi is one brand inside PepsiCo, which also owns Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos, Quaker, Gatorade and Mountain Dew. Every figure on this page covers the whole company, not just the cola.
What is most of Pepsi's waste made of?
The factory half is mostly food, including potato peel, processing residue and products damaged before sale. The packaging half is plastic, split between drinks bottles and the laminated film used for snack bags.
Did PepsiCo meet their 99% landfill diversion goal?
There is no published answer. PepsiCo committed to 99% diversion by 2025 and last reported 98% for 2023, but the deadline passed without a result and the goal was left out of their 2025 target set.
Why did PepsiCo's plastic figure drop in 2024?
Because the reporting scope changed, not the plastic. From 2025 PepsiCo report only their key packaging markets, which covers more than 80% of their worldwide plastic. Adjusted back to a global basis, the figure is flat.
How much of Pepsi's plastic packaging is recycled material?
18% in 2025, up from 3% in 2020. PepsiCo's target is 40% or more by 2035, which they lowered from an earlier goal of 50% by 2030.
How does Pepsi compare with Coca-Cola?
Coca-Cola use more plastic, about 3.6 million tonnes against PepsiCo's 2.5 million on a comparable basis. Measured against revenue PepsiCo use far less, because snacks carry more value per gram of packaging.
Images: Karol Szejner
