by Scott Cassel, CEO and Founder
PSI is excited to announce our partnership with GreenDot, a full-circle EPR management and recycling solutions provider in Europe and North America. GreenDot was founded in Germany in 1990 under the name Der Grüne Punkt (The Green Dot). There, it created the world’s first nationwide EPR program for household packaging, including hard-to-recycle plastics like flexible films. Der Grüne Punkt continues to design and operate every aspect of EPR management—including collection, sortation, and recycling—and now services more than 80 million people. The German EPR packaging model is considered the forerunner of the European Union’s current regulatory structure. It has inspired more than 30 packaging recovery organizations in Europe over the last 30 years.
In August of 2022, Der Grüne Punkt was purchased by Circular Resources and rebranded as Green Dot Global, which oversees a growing list of international affiliates that includes operations in North America and Europe. The company plans to expand operations into additional countries around the world with the aim of providing multinational consumer product brands solutions to meet their global recycling and recycled content targets.
GreenDot currently serves over 100,000 customers with a suite of EPR management services—including guidance on EPR compliance obligations; transparent tracking of collection, sorting, and recycling volumes; documentation of CO2 equivalent reduction through recycling; and certification of recycled content in plastic packaging. Their solutions aim to accelerate plastics circularity, even for challenging materials like flexible films. Annually, GreenDot recovers more than one million tons of household packaging waste and processes over 70,000 tons of post-consumer plastic packaging and LDPE. GreenDot’s recycling operations save over 600,000 tons of CO2 equivalents annually. GreenDot’s comprehensive approach—built on a passion for measurable change and problem-solving—helped drive Germany’s plastic packaging recycling rate from 3% in 1991 to over 60% today.
Now, they are bringing their decades of hands-on, real-life expertise to improve recycling in the United States, where the plastics recycling rate lingers under 10%. GreenDot will leverage its experience and technologies to develop effective, community-tailored collection and recycling solutions that benefit brand companies and make a lasting impact on underserved markets in the U.S.
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GreenDot is a Platinum Sponsor of the 2023 U.S. Product Stewardship Forum. We hope you’ll join them in Portland, Oregon September 11-14, where you can meet some of their leadership team members in person: Leslie Hushka, Managing Director of Green Dot North America, and Chief Sustainability Officer of Green Dot Global Group; Geoffrey Inch, Vice President, Sustainability & Policy; J.J. Rawlinson, Sustainability Director.
Contact info@green-dot.us to connect with Green Dot North America leadership.