Waste & Packaging

Aimed at increasing operational efficiency, and driven by our continuous improvement mindset, we are always looking for ways to reduce, repurpose, and divert waste from landfills. 

In FY20, we pledged to accelerate our global waste performance and made a formal commitment to make significant and sustainable progress by 2025.

More specifically, we are committed to:

Operational and Food Waste

From a food waste perspective, dairy is a highly efficient product because many of its byproducts can be valorized into a series of ingredients. As part of our Global Strategic Plan to accelerate organic growth, we are continually looking at ways to increase the value of our ingredients portfolio while also exploring opportunities to leverage all the nutritional elements that milk provides.

In FY24, we continued to implement a series of initiatives, including redirecting organics to animal feeds, progressing the completion of a biodigester in Argentina to process organics into biogas, and diverting our waste from landfills to other streams such as recycling facilities and energy suppliers. 

We continued our efforts in FY24 to redistribute food surplus in communities where we operate, donating more than 2.2 million kilos of products to food banks across our operations, which resulted in an estimated reduction of 10.7 million tonnes of CO₂e.

With these efforts, in FY24, our total food waste was 26,644 tonnes, an 14% improvement over our FY20 baseline. 

Packaging

While packaging is vital to ensuring the integrity and safety of our products, we recognize that it can also pose significant environmental impacts.

In FY24, all our divisions progressed on their roadmaps to achieve our 2025 targets.  

Some recent highlights: 

• In our Dairy Division (USA), we continued the introduction of PCR6 in our shrink film used at some of our plants. Our Dairy Division (Canada) is currently assessing if similar film could be rolled out in our plants in Canada.  
• In Australia, we launched our new CHEER refill slice packs, which contains 80% less plastic by removing the outer plastic container and encouraging consumers to reuse their existing CHEER container or a plastic container from home.
• Our Dairy Division (UK) was awarded ‘Flexible Plastic Pack of the Year’ in partnership with Amcor at the UK Packaging Awards 2023 for developing a recycle-ready grated cheese packaging for our Cathedral City brand. The flowpack changed from a mixed material packaging to a mono-plastic solution, which is easier to recycle. 
• We continued to pursue testing and development around recyclable flexible film, which remains a challenging material to replace in many of our divisions.