Kraft Heinz to Focus on Sustainable Packaging Efforts

As part of its commitment to reduce natural resource needs and manage its overall environmental footprint, the Kraft Heinz Company announced it will expand its environmental stewardship strategy to include time-bound targets for achieving greater packaging sustainability and setting science-based goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Specifically, Kraft Heinz stated it 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 is a complement to the company’s “Growing a Better World” strategy released in last year’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report.

“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, in a statement. “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 noted it will “aggressively pursue” technical alternatives while also collaborating externally to advance its 2025 commitment. The company explained it 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. The company added it will work toward increasing the usage of recycled content in its packaging and decreasing the overall volume of packaging used.

Kraft Heinz stressed that it has been working for years to optimize its high-volume packaging. For example, the company said it 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.

Kraft Heinz stated it will further outline its strategy and timeline for achieving this commitment in its next CSR Report, expected to be issued in 2019.

“We found that most of our emissions are coming from areas outside our direct operations,” added Hees. “To truly succeed as champions of sustainability, we will look at our full value chain and determine where we can make the greatest impact for our planet.”