The business has made a commitment to make 100% of its packaging reusable, recyclable or upcyclable to eliminate unnecessary plastic packaging by 2025 in Thailand, and by 2030 for its overseas operations.
To help deliver on this pledge, the new policy will focus on optimising packaging in four key areas:
- Promoting the use of materials from sustainably managed renewable resources.
- Supporting initiatives such as a ‘Take-back System’ to recycle or recover energy from used packaging.
- Increasing recycled material content where appropriate without compromising food safety and quality.
- Developing to move from single-use towards reuse models for packaging used in production line or transportation as relevant.
Chief executive officer of Charoen Pokphand Foods’ agro industrial business Sooksunt Jiumjaiswanglerg said: “CP Foods strives to be a responsible company with an environmentally friendly value chain. Therefore, it has been working on the way to find alternative substitutes to single-use plastic materials, especially in the hotspot areas where plastic packages are frequently used, such as feed mills, aquaculture farms and food processing plants.”
The recently launched Research and Development Centre will be play a vital role in the company’s packaging innovations, as well as providing solutions for package designs and other technical assistances to all of its businesses across the world.
Charoen Pokphand Foods has already made some developments in this area.
In 2017, the company successfully reduced its waste disposal to landfill and incineration per production unit by 9.08% compared to the baseline year of 2015.
Elsewhere, new technologies are applied at its chicken and food processing plants to minimise plastic waste in its production and logistic processes, allowing the company to drop over 3,500 tons of plastic since 2006. The chicken and food processing plants are aiming to achieve zero plastic bags to landfill by 2025.
Chief executive officer of food business Sukhawat Dansermsuk said it was the first company in Thailand to use polylactic acid (PLA), which is a biodegradable plastic substitute made of natural materials, for fresh pork and chicken packages.
“Our company strives to make packages that meet consumer expectations in term of function, design and food safety, while using innovations to maximise utilisation of natural resources in line with the concept of a circular economy, which has been a core principle of CP Foods’ business over the years,” he said.
In the past two years, 60% of animal feed bags used in the company’s livestock feed business in Thailand have been replaced by bulk feed tanks, enabling it to reduce 8,000 tons of plastic, helping to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 17,000 of the carbon dioxide equivalent. It has also extended this practice to operations in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Russia.