Tell General Mills to Reduce Single-Use Plastic Packaging—deadline 9/27

From PennEnvironment (http://www.pennenvironment.org):

When you think about General Mills, you probably think about your favorite cereal. Getting ready to pour out the perfect ratio of cereal to milk, you lift the cardboard tab and tear open the plastic bag standing between you and your breakfast. Unlike the cardboard cereal box, that plastic bag inside it can’t be recycled in many places.¹

All that packaging is contributing to overwhelming amounts of plastic littering our rivers and oceans, where it is choking sea turtles, birds and other wildlife.

Tell General Mills to reduce the amount of plastic packaging it uses at https://pennenvironment.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=51822.

As a global company with many popular brands, including Cheerios, Nature Valley, Yoplait, and Betty Crocker, most people probably encounter a General Mills product on just about every grocery run. But every time we restock our pantries and fridges, we end up with more plastic than we know what to do with.²

Our groceries are wrapped and packed in so many pieces of plastic.

Inside the cardboard box of our breakfast cereal, birthday cake mix or even a frozen pizza, there’s usually another layer of packaging — a plastic bag.

That’s not to mention other kinds of plastic packaging like plastic yogurt cups or squeeze tubes, plastic wrappers for granola bars, or the plastic lining inside a tub of ice cream.

This plastic is pervasive — but companies like General Mills can cut down on plastic food packaging.

Urge General Mills — maker of Cheerios, Yoplait and Betty Crocker — to cut down on this plastic packaging.

To protect our wildlife from the tons of plastic dumped into our environment every day, we know we need to stop using so much single-use plastic. And big companies need to take responsibility for the plastic mess they generate.

So we’re calling on General Mills to use less plastic across its products and lighten the load of plastic we’re forced to deal with. We need to generate a flood of messages before the next General Mills shareholder meeting on Sept. 27 and tell the company to scale back its plastic packaging.

When most plastic bags and many containers just can’t be recycled, we know stopping plastic at the source is the best way to deal with this waste problem. Making plastics thinner is one way to use less. And the company can develop plant-based compostable packaging to replace many of its plastic films, wrappers and containers.

General Mills has pledged to make all its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030. That’s a good start, but when only 5% of plastics in the U.S. are actually recycled, the company should focus on reducing plastic first.³

Other similar companies have set or committed to set plastic reduction goals. General Mills can do it too.⁴

Deadline Sept. 27: Add your name to help reduce plastic food packaging.

1. “Are your cereal liners recyclable and are they biodegradable?,” General Mills, last accessed September 9, 2022.
2. “Making food the world loves,” General Mills, last accessed September 9, 2022.
3. Valerie Volcovici, “U.S. plastic recycling rate drops to close to 5% – report,” Reuters, May 5, 2022.
4. “2022 Proxy Statement, Page 83,” General Mills, August 8, 2022.