Tetra Pak Makes Dedicated Efforts to Build a Low Carbon, Circular Economy

Tetra Pak is dedicated to support all of the 17 United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and prioritized those where the Company could have the greatest influence and impact. The report also features Tetra Pak’s achievements in its sustainability journey based on its cutting-edge technologies, good management and future human resources, etc. The Company has been implementing action plans to reduce the lifecycle impact of its packaging, processing and service solutions.

Tetra Pak Vietnam pilots the recycling program “One Second of Action to Protect the Environment” at schools

Fully renewable package

In 2018, Tetra Pak took the first steps to address marine litter by investing heavily on a new closures portfolio in line with our strategy to build a fully renewable package.

The Company plans to spend approximately 100 million euros per year for the next five years on developing alternative solutions to on-pack plastic straws, such as paper straws, tethered caps and other drink-from systems. Tetra Pak expects to industrialise production of paper straws on a scale that will meet global demand by 2025. It will incorporate a minimum of 2 percent recycled plastics content (2 percent in Europe) on average across beverage cartons by 2025, subject to technical and economic availability of suitable foodgrade recycled plastic.

Responsible sourcing

Tetra Pak sources 3.1 million tonnes of base materials (paperboard, polymer and aluminium) every year. The Company fully understand that the way it buys has a profound impact on people, the environment and the economy.

Some 71 percent of the raw material Tetra Pak put in our carton packages is paperboard. In 2018, Tetra Pak reached the major milestone of helping customers produce more than 460 billion FSC (Forest Stewardship Council™) labelled packages since 2007. Tetra Pak has been on the CDP A-List Forests Programme for the last three years in recognition of its work in managing and mitigating risks associated with the sourcing and production of timber.

Tetra Pak’s long-term ambition is for all chilled and ambient packages to use renewable and/or recycled polymers. Tetra Pak’s supplier is also establishing a Bonsucro Chain of Custody from sugar cane plantation to their production facility for renewable polyethylene. 60% of the bioethanol used for our renewable polyethylene was sourced with Bonsucro Certification.

Teachers are instructed on collecting and recycling carton packages

Heavy investment on recycling

Having invested more than 25 years of exploring and evaluating recycling technologies, Tetra Pak visions that all beverage cartons are collected for recycling, and zero beverage cartons become litter or are sent to landfill. The Company did invest 20 million Euro to support recycling infrastructures from 2012 to 2018.

Environmental-friendly technologies

In May 2018, Tetra Pak launched Encapt^TM technology for high capacity separators for the dairy industry, helps to reduce the air pressure around the spinning bowl which lowers the air friction and thereby the energy consumption. The combination of the new Encapt™ technology, and the established AirTight design enables as much as 40 percent savings compared to alternative separator designs.

In addition, Tetra Pak has made great improvements to its JNSD beverage line architecture by combining UV, filtration and aseptic technologies. The white paper case study shows that the results would be energy reduction of 67 percent and water savings of 50 percent in juice production.

The Tetra Pak® Extrusion Wheel lets customers make premium, uniform, high quality ice cream products at the highest capacity and lowest cost in the industry. The Extrusion Wheel for ice cream products reduces waste in 98% line yield and records a maximum level of 2% waste compared to the usual 8%.

Eliminating climate impacts

In 2016, Tetra Pak was the first-ever company in the food packaging industry to have climate impact reduction targets approved by Science Based Targets (SBT) initiative. The Company committed to reducing its operational GHG emissions by 42 percent by 2030 and 58 percent by 2040, from a 2015 baseline, and to reducing GHG emissions across the value chain per unit of revenue by 16 percent by 2020 from a 2010 base-year. As working on the new strategy, Tetra Pak is looking at how best to ensure alignment with the latestscience that indicates the need to keep global temperature increase below 1.5°C.

Renewable energy

Tetra Pak is on track to have 80 percent of its operations supplied with renewable electricity by 2020, and 100 percent by 2030. The Company is evaluating how Tetra Pak can directly initiate new renewable projects in the regions where it operates.

Sustainable supply chain

Tetra Pak’s supply chain accounts for 45 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in its value chain. Tetra Pak works closely with suppliers and partners to identify efficiencies, both in their operations and through their own supply and the Company formally evaluate supplier sustainability performance annually.