• March 2023

  • Minimising our footprint: adopting a circular approach for a waste-free world

At JDE Peet’s we are striving towards a planet-positive supply chain through innovation and collaboration on sustainable solutions.​ To minimise our environmental footprint, we are prioritising our work in areas where we have the biggest impact, so we can deliver lasting change.

We believe in a circular economy and are working to promote this by delivering our products in packaging materials suitable for reusing, recycling, or composting, while reducing our manufacturing waste and maintaining ​product quality and safety.

 

Minimising Footprint

Our approach to sustainable packaging and waste-reduction

We take an end-to-end sustainability approach, working with our partners along the supply chain, in our efforts to reduce waste. ​We are working with our suppliers to ensure our consumers can re-use, recycle or compost our packaging. We are also working to ensure our factories minimise and recycle their waste, and create value from waste streams, as we strive for zero waste to landfill across our network.​

JDE Peet’s waste-reduction targets

By 2050, our target is to produce zero waste. Our journey to get there involves:

  • Achieving zero waste-to-landfill at all our manufacturing facilities by 2030.
  • Moving towards 100% of our packaging designed to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030.

In addition to rolling out fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging across our entire product offering, we are also reviewing our portfolio to identify areas where we can optimise packaging weight and reduce packaging waste.

Finally, in several countries, we partner with waste management companies to support the improvement of packaging waste material collection and sorting to improve circularity.

78% of our packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable. We’re working towards 100% by 2030.

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Minimising packaging

To drive continuous reduction of packaging, we have embedded in our innovation process a packaging intensity metric. We calculate the total weight of packaging per cup for every product we sell and have build a tool to automate this, which means we can view this information in a quick-to-use dashboard.

Armed with this information, we have set improvement targets around the amount of packaging that can be used. If a JDE Peet’s’ brand wants to launch or adapt a product, they must keep within these limits.

Case Study – Glass: a huge opportunity for reduction

Through our innovative ratio approach to reduce the weight of packaging, we identified a huge opportunity for emissions and material use reduction in glass.

Glass accounts for 40% of our packaging portfolio globally. Even though we have a high serving count inside instant jars, the weight of the glass itself is high and a lot of energy is used to produce the glass or recycle it. There is a huge opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by reducing material use and partnering with our glass suppliers to reduce their reliance on fossil energy.

In the last year we began to reduce the weight of the glass but still achieve the same quality and safety metrics, maintain barrier properties, and limit the number of breaks occurring during transport. We reduced the weight of each jar by 10-15%, leading to a material saving of just over 3,000 tons of glass.

3,000 tons of glass have been saved in the last year by reducing the weight of each jar by 10-15%

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Looking forward

We will continue our work to reduce packaging waste, as well as food waste, by ensuring the packaging that we do use protects the quality and longevity of our products.

In the future we would like to see different, innovative materials in use. In supermarkets we see a lot of paper, glass, and plastic packaging, but not a lot of alginate-based materials (derived from seaweed), or post-processed wood - materials that are more regenerative. We are really excited about the opportunities that exist for us to do and innovate more, to achieve our ultimate goal of a planet-positive supply chain.