Mexico is having a plastics reckoning. On one hand, it leads the Americas in recovering and recycling PET bottles—63–64% of PET placed on the market is captured and reprocessed, with goals of 70% by 2025 and 80% by 2030 under the National Agreement for the New Plastics Economy. On the other hand, overall plastics recycling remains uneven. Flexible packaging is a stubborn gap, and national policy is still transitioning from a patchwork of local bans to a coherent, federal circular economy framework. The next five years will decide whether Mexico’s momentum becomes a model or stalls under the weight of hard-to-recycle waste and fragmented regulation.

Where Mexico stands today

The achievements in PET are real and transformative. Industry data points to sustained increases in PET recovery (63%) and a clear, time-bound pathway to 2030 targets. This includes:

• 30% average recovery for other plastics by 2025 and 45% by 2030
• Minimum recycled content thresholds in packaging (20% by 2025; 30% by 2030)

This progress reflects years of investment in collection, education, and domestic reprocessing capacity. Yet PET’s success can mask deeper challenges. The LGPGIR (Mexico’s federal waste law) has long enshrined shared responsibility and valorization, but implementation has suffered from uneven enforcement, municipal capacity constraints, and regulatory fragmentation across states. Subnational single-use bans helped reduce problem items but also underscored the need for harmonized national standards and financing mechanisms to move beyond bans into a systems change.

The 2030 roadmap taking shape

In 2025, SEMARNAT began drafting a National Circular Economy Policy (2025–2030) alongside a proposed General Law on Circular Economy that would introduce:

• mandatory extended producer responsibility (EPR)
• national traceability
• circular design requirements

PROMARNAT 2025–2030 reinforces this direction with a pillar on advancing circular economy and waste management. If enacted and implemented well, EPR could finance collection and sorting upgrades, integrate the informal sector, and push design changes at scale. But these ambitions must translate to binding targets and dependable funding streams.

Mexico’s circular transition is also taking shape within a broader North American context. Under the 2025–2028 Canada–Mexico Action Plan , both countries identify environment and sustainability as one of four strategic pillars guiding joint action. Aligning goals and sharing best practices across North America can accelerate implementation, support infrastructure investment, and harmonize approaches to complex waste streams.

The flexibles frontier

Mexico’s PET story is not yet replicated for flexible and multilayer packaging i.e., pouches, snack bags, and films that are voluminous, contaminated, and chemically complex. Industry and civil society agree that this is one of the toughest fractions in the country’s waste stream, growing faster than the installed capacity to collect and recycle it.

In late 2025, ECOCE – the industry-backed nonprofit that administers Mexico’s national packaging management plan – began a multi-year collaboration with Aduro to evaluate Hydrochemolytic™ Technology (HCT) on real post-consumer flexible and mixed plastic packaging sourced through ECOCE’s systems. The program will characterize Mexican feedstocks, test processability and yields from lab to pilot scale, and assess product quality for potential downstream use. It is a pragmatic attempt to generate evidence for a stubborn waste category.

This matters for two reasons. First, Mexico’s circular targets hinge on all plastic formats, not just PET. Second, EPR-funded systems will need advanced technologies for hard-to-recycle resins to avoid shunting them to landfills or incineration. Aduro’s HCT promises low-temperature, water-assisted chemistry to convert mixed plastics into liquid hydrocarbons suitable for existing infrastructure. Such deployment aims to complement, and not displace, mechanical and solvent-based solutions wherever they are feasible.

What success by 2030 looks like

A credible roadmap would knit together four strands:

1. Policy certainty with EPR: Pass and operationalize the national circular law and strategy with binding recovery and recycled-content targets, eco-modulated fees, robust traceability, and formal integration of waste pickers.
   
   
2. Infrastructure scale-up beyond PET: Expand funded collection, sorting, and reprocessing for HDPE, PP, and flexibles, ensuring material capture rises alongside generation.
   
   
3. Technology portfolio, not techno-fix: Continue neutral, transparent pilots across mechanical, solvent-based, and chemical routes for complex wastes, including the Aduro-ECOCE trials, reporting outcomes publicly and aligning with policy incentives that prioritize true circularity and emissions reductions.
   
   
4. Design and demand shifts: Enforce eco-design standards and reward recycled content, while growing end-markets for secondary materials, so captured plastics have reliable buyers and quality thresholds are met.
   
   

Mexico has already proved that coordinated, industry-backed action can move the needle as seen in the case of PET. The 2030 task is to institutionalize that success through a robust national circular framework and extend it to the plastics that have lagged. The Aduro–ECOCE collaboration is one useful test case in a broader portfolio. Mexico’s plastics moment will be defined by whether the country can turn promising pilots, clear targets, and social inclusion into a nationwide, financed, and enforceable circular system by 2030.