CP Foods launches green packaging for meat range
Senior vice president for corporate social responsibility and sustainability development Wuthichai Sithipreedanant said the company has redesigned its food packages for fresh chicken and pork products to “optimise all resources used in food production, reducing waste, especially plastic waste, and promote the use of environmentally friendly materials in accordance with the concept of Circular Economy”.
CP Foods has committed to make 100% of its plastic food packaging to be reusable, recyclable, up-cyclable or compostable by 2025 for Thailand operations and by 2030 for international operations. This commitment will also support the nation’s goal of plastic management and UN Sustainable Development Goals.
To help achieve this goal, the business has developed food packaging specialists and invested in Research and Development Center, which is playing a key role in creating sustainable packaging as well as providing solutions for package designs and other of technical assistances to all CP Foods’ businesses across the world.
CP Foods has already redesigned many of its packages such as replacing raw chicken products’ multilayer plastic package with a single layer package that is smaller and 100% recyclable, resulting in a 43% less plastic package and 24% cost saving.
“We are working on sustainable design and applying new technologies in our packaging process to reduce our environmental footprint and move from single use towards eco-friendly packaging,” Wuthichai said.
CP Foods is also using plant-based Polylactic Acid (PLA) trays, which is a compostable bioplastic made from natural renewable resources in chilled raw chicken and pork products, as a replacement for plastic tray. In 2018, the company could reduce more than 3.9 million PET trays or over 60 tons of plastic, which is equivalent to GHG emissions reduction of 132 tons CO2 per year.
Sustainable initiatives
In the food retail outlets and restaurant business, the company is phasing out single use plastic food service ware, transitioning to bioplastic materials. While in Belgium, Top Foods, a subsidiary of CP Foods, has developed a food package made of eco-friendly wood pulp to reduce plastic consumption for PURE’s Vegan Lasagna.
Wuthichai added that the company also made initiatives to reduce plastics throughout value chain. It has replaced plastic feed bags with Bulk Feed Tank in livestock feed business and in 2018, the Thailand operation was able to reduce 62% of plastic feed bags, accounting for 9,600 tons of plastic.
