How to Achieve Circular at Scale: Meijer’s Recycling Strategy

Containers and packaging accounted for 82.2 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, amounting to 28.1 percent of total generation. Much of these materials pile up in landfills, where it contributes to groundwater and soil contamination, greenhouse gas emissions, plastic pollution in waterways, and ecosystem damage. 

One of Michigan’s largest retailers, Meijer, known for pioneering the one-stop shopping concept, has stepped up to pioneer another frontier in the industry: recycling.

“Recycled content finds its way into virtually every aspect of our sustainability program, from products to packaging,” explains Erik Petrovskis, director of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability at Meijer. “We are always looking for products and processes that extend, recover, and reuse materials that are still useful and better kept out of the landfill, especially plastics.”

Plastic Bag Reduction and Recovery

In the U.S. alone, more than 100 billion single-use plastic bags are used each year – the equivalent of more than 300 bags per person, less than 10 percent of which get recycled. 

Meijer has introduced several initiatives to reduce and recycle plastic bags and packaging:

• Reusable bags: customers are encouraged to bring reusable shopping bags and the retailer is piloting new signage in select parking lots and stores to remind customers to do so.
• Changing the default: Meijer has eliminated single-use plastic bags at two market-format stores: Bridge Street Market in Grand Rapids and Woodward Corner Market in Detroit, where they carry alternative reusable bags available for purchase.
• Recycling: Meijer locations have recycling bins where customers can drop off everything from grocery, ice, and bread bags to cereal package liners and product wrap. This includes packaging that carries the How2Recycle “Store Drop Off” label, which most municipal and curbside recycling programs do not recycle. Meijer also collects the plastic film material from its own operations and local businesses. Through this program, 9.4 million pounds of plastic film were recycled in 2024 alone.

In November 2021, Meijer also conducted a pilot project with Dow to employ a new paving technique that recycled plastic bags to create a more durable parking lot at the retailer’s Holland, Mich., supercenter. The project used approximately 12,500 lbs. of post-consumer recycled plastic (PCR), the equivalent of 944,000 plastic bags. Since installation, the parking lot has performed similarly to those paved using the standard technique.

Additionally, Meijer is involved in the Beyond the Bag Consortium, a multi-year collaboration of retailers working to improve reusable bag use and identify and apply new design solutions to single-use plastic bags with less environmental impact.

Pill Bottle Recycling

Retail pharmacies receive the majority of their supply of prescription pills in white high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bottles, which pose several challenges for recycling, including the fact that they are often viewed by recyclers as “contamination” due to their foil seals and opaque white color.

In 2019, Meijer partnered with a regional recycling company to shred and “pelletize” the bottles, allowing them to be aggregated with other materials and added to existing supply chains.

Notably, a customer of the recycling company was already buying HDPE to make counterweights for cabinetry manufactured by several West Michigan furniture companies. Today, a significant portion of the counterweights found in Michigan-made cabinetry were once pharmacy pill bottles.

As a result of this initiative, Meijer recycled 231,453 pounds of HDPE pill bottles in 2024 for use in various products, including furniture. 

Garden Center Recycling Service

The Association of Plastic Recyclers reports that recycled plastic reduces energy consumption by 88 percent and cuts emissions by 71 percent from Polypropylene, the plastic used to manufacture flower pots and trays.

Meijer’s three primary suppliers of annual flowers, all West Michigan-based, provide the retailer with 6.5 million plants each year. In 2014, the retailer began collecting the plastic containers on recycling carts in its Garden Centers and working with suppliers to consolidate, sort, and ship the containers to East Jordan Plastics Inc., a South Haven, Michigan-based plastic processing company. The initiative collected 685,486 pounds of plastic between January 2024 and August 2025 across all participating retailers.

“Incorporating…recycling in its various aspects into our daily operations aligns with our company values and pushes further product innovations. And this keeps us on a path of continual improvement,” says Petrovskis.