Waste of space

The decision to drive firms towards more sustainability is a simple one, according to Richard Laxton of dairy company Arla: "Reduce your waste, increase sustainability now and you'll still have a viable business in the future."

It's a philosophy that Arla has taken to its heart, committing to a zero-waste to landfill target across its UK operations during 2010 and a 25% cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2020 across its global operations, as well as taking part in cutting edge research into novel techniques to help achieve these goals.

"Our watchword is resource efficiency. If we can find a more effective way of moving up the waste disposal hierarchy, at the end of the day we will be saving money," says Laxton.

Not every firm is quite as enthusiastic about donning the green mantle, but there is no doubt that the UK food manufacturing industry has already made substantial progress towards improving sustainability within its operations.

In 2007 the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) published its Five-Fold Ambition, complete with targets for cuts in CO2 emissions, water consumption and transport miles, a goal of zero food and packaging waste ending up in landfill by 2015 and a commitment to an absolute reduction in the amount of food packaging entering UK households.

The FDF's next overall progress report is due at the end of November, but the latest one was published last year. It showed that by 2006, the industry had already cut its carbon emissions by 17% compared with 1990. "The absolute reduction that was achieved by 2006 is partly why we're confident that we will be able to go with our aspiration of 30% by 2020," says FDF sustainability manager David Bellamy.

Similarly, waste to landfill has been dramatically reduced to just 17% of former levels, but Bellamy cautions that meeting the zero-landfill ambition remains a serious challenge. "The bulk of the remaining 17% is mixed food and packaging waste and we need to find a way of segregating it," he says. The key will be working closely with specialised agencies such as the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP) and Envirowise.

"A lot of times it comes down to segregation. Sometimes it's not that food is inside the packaging, it's that they've chucked it all into one container," says Ian Humphries, regional director of NISP in the West Midlands. "We can certainly advise and help people with best practice."

NISP's philosophy is that one firm's waste is another's raw material. The trick is to bring these firms together. Of over 12,000 members nationally, around 5% are from the food and drink sector. The programme has matched spent pea shingle from watercress growers with aggregate suppliers, and waste heat from the chemical industry with greenhouses growing tomatoes, for example. Finding local food waste streams to feed anaerobic digesters is a particularly fruitful area.

Elsewhere within the Five-Fold Ambition, the Courtauld Commitment is the agreement through which firms promise to reduce the amount of packaging they pass on to consumers. It's run by WRAP and in July 2008, WRAP announced that it had reached its first goal of designing out the growth in packaging reaching households and that it was on track to achieve absolute reductions by 2010. However, the Commitment expires next year, and talks are now underway to define its replacement.

"We're discussing the next step with the signatories to the agreement," says Charlotte Henderson, retail supply chain programme manager at WRAP. "We're looking at going beyond weight-based targets to include carbon targets. We're also looking beyond household waste to waste in the supply chain."

On the water side, the vehicle for encouraging savings is the Federation House Commitment (FHC). The scheme is administered and audited by Envirowise, and its signatories have reported a 1.7% reduction compared with 2007 levels. "1.7% is a good step forward," says Bellamy. "It doesn't sound like a big figure but it's a good start towards our target of a 20% reduction by 2020."

Things are less clear in transport, because it has taken longer to implement the FDF's approach. "Firms can only implement changes as their contracts with hauliers come up for renewal," explains Bellamy. "It's also a slightly different ambition because we're not collecting data, but qualitative information about improvements they've made. We're now getting quite a bit of case study material."

The FDF's November report is expected to provide anecdotal evidence that the supply chain is making serious efforts to meet the government's target of a 20% reduction in food miles between 2002 and 2012.

It all sounds pretty good so far, but before everyone starts mutual backslapping, what's the verdict from external specialists? "They're moving in the right direction, but probably not fast enough given the scale of the challenges ahead," says Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Surrey.

The food chain as a whole contributes around one fifth of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is responsible for about half of this and manufacturing operations around 11% of the food chain total. Even so, manufacturers have a crucial role to play, according to Garnett: "Food manufacture's biggest influence is in what ingredients it uses."

The ingredients with the biggest carbon impact are meat and dairy and Garnett says we've all got to get used to eating far less: "It's not as simple as saying we should all go vegetarian, but we are talking about substantial reductions in consumption. The food industry has a vital role to play because it's innovative in getting us to try new things. Who liked sushi 10 years ago? And 30 years ago pasta was new-fangled. Food tastes are mutable.

"Industry should also be carbon checking innovation, so instead of inventing a new whiz-bang ice cream that requires more refrigeration they could be looking at products that are less greenhouse gas intensive."

While pushing consumers to adopt a radically different diet may be a tall order there is a consensus building that companies need to take a more holistic view of sustainability.

"Where we are traditionally is that companies focus on what's happening in their sites, rather than upstream or downstream," says Henderson. "That's going to change." For example, a manufacturer might put extra packaging on a pizza primarily to prevent damage caused by the way it's handled at the distribution warehouse. Both links in the chain need to co-operate to find a solution.

Earlier this year there was a good example of cooperation from Easter egg manufacturers, whIch agreed to reduce packaging by at least 25%. The agreement included Cadbury UK, Kraft UK, Magna Specialist Confectioners, Mars UK and Nestlé UK. "None of these firms could have made that decision alone because their products would have looked too different on the shelf," says Henderson. WRAP is working to identify more areas for collaboration.

Of course, many businesses still have plenty of scope for improvement within their own operations. "Work we've done suggests that waste management costs 45% of turnover in a typical business. It's not just the cost of the skip, it's the cost of materials going into that bin," says Matthew Rowland-Jones, head of the retail food and drink team at Envirowise.

"I worked with a pie manufacturer who recognised that the filling was more expensive than pastry, so made too much pastry for each run to ensure they used up all the filling. We calculated that they were losing £0.5M in pastry waste every year. We often find that people have a 'this is the way we've always done things' mindset. They may just need to take a step back."

WRAP, NISP and Envirowise are all good sources of support, but the structure of that support may be changing from next year. From April, WRAP will be the government's lead resource efficiency agency, but whether NISP and Envirowise will be incorporated within WRAP won't be announced until late October. Nevertheless, their work is expected to continue regardless. FM