As part of its commitment to reduce natural resource needs and manage its overall environmental footprint, The Kraft Heinz Company has expanded its environmental stewardship strategy to include time-bound targets for achieving greater packaging sustainability and setting science-based goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Specifically, Kraft Heinz supports the move toward a circular economy and aims to make 100% of its packaging globally recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025. This announcement, a complement to its Growing a Better World strategy released in last year’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report, supports the company’s broader efforts to improve the sustainability of its supply chain.
“Our collective industry has a massive challenge ahead of us with respect to packaging recyclability, end-of-life recovery, and single-use plastics,” says Bernardo Hees, CEO at Kraft Heinz. “Even though we don’t yet have all the answers, we owe it to current and future generations who call this planet ‘home’ to find better packaging solutions and actively progress efforts to improve recycling rates. That’s why Kraft Heinz is placing heightened focus on this important environmental issue.”
Kraft Heinz will aggressively pursue technical alternatives while also collaborating externally to advance its commitment to deliver 100% recyclable, reusable, or compostable packaging by 2025. The company will partner with packaging experts, organizations, and coalitions to explore technical, end-of-life, and infrastructure solutions, and is already collaborating with Environmental Packaging International (EPI) for consulting, tracking, and other specialist services in the packaging space. The company also will work toward increasing the usage of recycled content in its packaging and decreasing the overall volume of packaging used.
While the global packaging target is new, Kraft Heinz is no stranger to advancing the sustainability of its packaging. Evidenced by previous work in this space, it has been working for years to optimize its high-volume packaging. For example, Kraft Heinz recently exceeded its commitment to reduce the weight of its global packaging by more than 55,000 tons. Additionally, Kraft Heinz Europe is working to make the recyclable Heinz Tomato Ketchup PET plastic bottle fully circular by 2022, by using recycled material that can be made back into food-grade packaging.
Kraft Heinz will further outline its strategy and timeline for achieving this commitment in its next CSR Report, expected to be issued in 2019.
In addition, Kraft Heinz is doing its part to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy by joining the Science Based Targets Initiative and working to set science-based GHG reduction goals in its supply chain. Adoption of these particularly aggressive targets is aimed at helping avoid a global temperature increase of more than 2°C.
Says Hees, “We found that most of our emissions are coming from areas outside our direct operations. To truly succeed as champions of sustainability, we will look at our full value chain and determine where we can make the greatest impact for our planet.”
The company plans to announce these new science-based goals when their current commitments expire in 2020.
