The Kraft Heinz Company announced the expansion of its environmental stewardship strategy to include time-bound targets for achieving greater packaging sustainability and setting science-based goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The company supports the move toward a circular economy and aims to make 100 percent 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 (CSR) Report, supports 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,” said 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 sustainable commitment. 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. Kraft Heinz also will work toward increasing the usage of recycled content in its packaging and decreasing the overall volume of packaging used.
The company recently exceeded its commitment to reduce the weight of its global packaging by 50,000 metric tonnes. 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.
In addition, Kraft Heinz has joined the Science Based Targets Initiative and is working to set science-based greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals in its supply chain.