Packaging is an essential part of our products and performs several functions, such as, protecting the product, marketing the brand and providing information to our consumers. Our choice of materials is influenced by many factors, including the move that some retailers are making towards shelf-ready packaging to reduce handling complexity. Too much packaging leads to unnecessary use of materials, higher carbon emissions and extra cost.
Our efforts in this area are focused on reducing material use through lightweighting, reusing containers where possible and increasing recycled content, and working with our customers and other stakeholders. As a first step, we are seeking to use less packaging material. This has obvious benefits in terms of the raw materials and energy we consume and the financial savings we can make.
As a company, we have become a signatory of the Courtauld Commitment II - a responsibility deal aimed at improving resource efficiency and reducing the carbon and wider environmental impact of the grocery retail sector. It supports the aim of the UK Climate Change Act 2008, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.
Working with the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), signatories develop individual and collective ‘sector’ strategy plans to deliver the targets below. Each one is measured from a 2009 baseline and runs to December 2012:
• Reduce the carbon impact of grocery packaging by 10%
• Reduce UK household food and drink wastes by 4%
• Reduce grocery product and packaging waste in the grocery supply chain by 5%
An example of what we have done so far, is reducing the weight of our Peroni Gran Reserva bottle from 310g per unit to 185g, saving 1858.33 tonnes in weight per year and 1.58 CO2 tonnes per year. Where possible we also use recycled materials - for example all the cardboard used to package our beer products is made from 100% recycled card.
As well as technical intiatives we take to reduce our packaging and packaging waste we are also looking at practical ways we can reduce our environmental impacts in this area. We have established a cross-functional internal project team to work on this issue. The team has already made a difference through the introduction of re-usable pallets to the business, and improved pack storage for our products that has enabled us to improve the efficiency of our deliveries.