BANGKOK — Charoen Pokphand Foods (CP Foods), Thailand’s leading food producer, announced sustainable packaging policy to reduce plastic footprint from its business worldwide.
Realizing the urgency of global plastic waste crisis, CP Foods has made a commitment to achieve 100% of the Company’s packaging to be reusable or recyclable or upcyclable or compostable and eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging.
The goals are expected to be accomplished by 2025 for Thailand operations and by 2030 for overseas operations.
With this policy, CP Foods will develop and manage packaging sustainably by considering throughout the value chain, achieving the company’s sustainable goal to cut waste disposal to landfill and incineration by 30% within 2020 when compared to 2015’s performance.
As of 2017 data, the company successfully reduced waste disposal to landfill and incineration per production unit by 9.08% compared to the baseline year of 2015.
The policy is set to support CP Group’s ‘Sustainable Packaging” policy, stating that CP Group and its business units in Thailand must commit to ensure that 100% of plastic packaging must be made of sustainable materials by the year 2025.
CP Foods also made a global commitment as a member of notable sustainability organizations such as Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to reduce ecological footprints from its products and operations.
To deliver on these promises, the policy has a framework to optimize its packaging in the four key areas, including 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, and developing to move from single-use towards reuse models for packaging used in production line or transportation as relevant.
“CP Foods strives to be a responsible company with an environmental 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,” Mr. Sooksunt Jiumjaiswanglerg, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – Agro Industrial Business and Co-President of CP Foods, said.
Since 2017, 60% of animal feed bags used in the company’s livestock feed business in Thailand has been replaced by bulk feed tank. It is able to reduce 8,000 tons of plastic, helping the company to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission by 17,000 of carbon dioxide equivalent. It also extend this successful practice to operations in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Russia.
The company were able to reduce 1,600 tons of plastic, 3,600 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, at aquaculture farms by using Q-pass tank as a replacement of plastic baby shrimp containers.
New technologies are applied at chicken and food processing plants to minimize plastic waste in production and logistic process, allowing the company to drop over 3,500 tons of plastic since 2006. The chicken and food processing plants target to achieve zero plastic bag to landfill within 2025.
Mr. Sukhawat Dansermsuk, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – Food Business and Co-President at CP Foods, said it is the first company in Thailand to use Poly Lactic Acid (PLA), which is a biodegradable plastic substitute made of natural materials, for fresh pork and chicken packages.
“Our company strives to made packages, which meet consumer expectation in term of function, design, food safety while using innovations to maximize utilization of natural resources in line with the concept of Circular Economy, which has been a core principle of CP Foods’ business over the years,” he said.
To achieve this packing vision, CP Foods have developed packaging specialists and encourages creativity to develop innovation and renovation. The recently launched Research and Development Center will be play a vital role in the company’s packaging innovations as well as providing solutions for package designs and other of technical assistances to all CP Foods’ businesses across the world.
