After Eight Years and 31 Companies, Outdoor Industry Closes the Book on Poly Bags

The European Outdoor Group has wound down its Single Use Plastics Project, an eight-year collaboration among 31 brands, retailers and national associations that built shared standards for cutting single-use plastic out of outdoor gear packaging. The group has concluded it met its core goals and agreed to bring it to a close.

A shared problem, not a brand-by-brand one

SUPP began in 2018 after EOG members and other industry figures pushed for a coordinated response to poly bags, the thin plastic sleeves used to protect clothing and equipment through the supply chain. Rather than let each company solve the problem alone, the project was built to work across the whole value chain, aligning company approaches so no single organisation had to carry the workload or the cost by itself.

The project drew in packaging manufacturers and outside experts alongside brands and retailers, giving members access to a shared knowledge base, network and research, including life cycle assessments. Verity Hardy, EOG's sustainability project manager, said the aim was to design, test and roll out an approach that would cut the use of newly produced plastic and raise the share of recycled low-density polyethylene, or LDPE, used in polybags.

What SUPP actually built

The project's work unfolded in stages. Early research, carried out in 2019, established the scale of the industry's single-use plastic footprint. Pilot testing of proposed fixes ran from late 2019 into 2021, with wider rollout following from 2022.

The finished outputs include:

• The Poly Bag Standards document, setting common technical benchmarks for the bags still in use

• A final project report, recommending a system for collecting and properly handling protective poly bags before they reach incinerators, landfill or export

• Retailer guidance, on integrating poly bag removal into day-to-day operations

• A short consumer film, explaining the project's aims and progress

• Member-only resources, developed for companies directly involved

Beyond the bags themselves, the project helped participating companies strip polybags from some e-commerce products entirely and developed design guidance for packaging meant to be recycled or reused. All the public material remains hosted on the project's dedicated website, which will stay live after the project's formal close.

Marta Pellegrino, senior sustainability specialist at The North Face, credited the collaborative structure itself, saying the ability to challenge the company's peers to find shared solutions, together with EOG's leadership, had been central to the results achieved at her own company.

The numbers behind it

SUPP's collection trials give some sense of scale. By 2023, the project reported it had collected, diverted from landfill and recycled 14.31 metric tonnes of single-use plastic since it began. Earlier figures from just two UK pick-up points alone put the total at 4.6 tonnes of poly bags collected, with roughly 691,000 individual bags diverted from waste through the trials.

Unfinished business

EOG was clear that the project's end isn't a declaration of victory on plastic packaging generally. The group has flagged several gaps that remain: better data on how alternative materials actually perform environmentally, improved recycling infrastructure for thin plastic films specifically, and clearer regulatory direction from revised EU law. EOG says it intends to keep working on these issues with its partners, even without SUPP as a standing project.

That regulatory landscape is already shifting. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which entered into force in February 2025, begins general application on 12 August 2026 and will eventually replace the older Packaging Waste Directive. It introduces EU-wide, directly applicable rules rather than directive-based ones that member states interpret differently, and it sets mandatory minimum recycled-content thresholds for plastic packaging, phased in from 2030 at rates of roughly 30 to 65 percent depending on the packaging category. From 2030, only packaging meeting certain recyclability grades will be allowed on the market at all, tightening further by 2038. For an industry that ships enormous volumes of gear internationally, that timeline gives SUPP's design guidance and standards a second life as compliance groundwork, even with the project itself now closed.