Mondelēz International — the snack giant behind Oreo, Cadbury, Ritz, and Clif Bar — can’t come close to meeting the plastic packaging targets it set for itself in 2018 and 2021.
Yet it continues to advocate for the very Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mandates (and fees), global treaty obligations, and industry coalitions that will make those unmet targets more costly to miss. National Legal and Policy Center is calling it out — and circulating an exempt solicitation report to Mondelēz investors ahead of the Company’s May 20, 2026 annual meeting. An executive summary is also available. NLPC urges shareholders to vote FOR Item 4, a proposal asking the Board to commission an objective, independent evaluation of the Company’s plastics packaging policies.
The scorecard from Mondelēz’s own 2024 sustainability report is damning. Recyclable packaging design: stagnant at 96 percent for three consecutive years, two points below the Company’s 2025 goal. Virgin rigid plastic reduction: 1.4 percent, against a pledged 25 percent. Recycled plastic content: 1.6 percent, against a 5 percent target. And shortly after disclosing all of this, Mondelēz walked away from the U.S. Plastics Pact — the industry coalition whose targets it could no longer pretend it was going to meet.
What makes this particularly galling is the context in which it’s happening. Chair and CEO Dirk Van de Put (pictured above) has spent the better part of two years telling shareholders that volume is down, adjusted EPS dropped 14.6 percent in 2025, and the road ahead is difficult — blaming record cocoa costs, consumer anxiety about affordability, and a challenging macro environment.
These are legitimate headwinds. But Van de Put hasn’t disclosed the self-imposed costs the Company is adding on top: the premium it pays for recycled feedstock over virgin resin, EPR fees clicking into place across seven states, and compliance personnel dedicated to reporting and paying packaging taxes to state agencies operating under incompatible rules. Consumers already paying more for Oreos because of cocoa prices shouldn’t also be paying a plastics tariff — but they are.
The scientific case for this agenda is also crumbling. The peer-reviewed literature, including a major 2024 study in Environmental Science & Technology, shows plastic produces fewer lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than alternatives in the overwhelming majority of applications. And The Guardian‘s blockbuster January 2026 investigation found that the alarming microplastics-in-humans studies driving activist pressure on companies like Mondelēz are probably the result of lab contamination and false positives — what one chemist called “a bombshell.” The crisis narrative that launched these corporate plastics commitments is based on advocacy research, not rigorous science.
There’s also a legal angle the Board’s opposition statement ignores entirely. A coalition of state attorneys general that started at five and grew to ten by February 2026 has formally warned Mondelēz and nearly 80 other companies that coordinating packaging standards across competitors through groups like the Consumer Goods Forum and U.S. Plastics Pact may violate antitrust law. Shareholders have a right to know whether the Board has assessed this exposure. Apparently, it hasn’t told them.
NLPC’s proposal is modest: commission and publish an independent, objective, quantifiable assessment of whether these plastics policies actually serve the Company’s financial interests and its shareholders. Read the executive summary and full report. Then support Item 4 — voting for the meeting is open NOW.
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
