Climate and circularity

Our climate and circularity pillar focuses on three major topics: climate change; sustainable ingredients, with an emphasis on deforestation, circular agriculture and novel ingredients; and our commitment to sustainable packaging.

Climate change and footprinting

Understanding our impact is an essential part of reducing our CO₂ footprint, as it enables us to track performance against our targets. Carbon footprinting is a fundamental part of building a robust and science-based environmental strategy.

Nutreco has reported the CO₂ footprint of its operations since 2009. In our Vision 2020, we made a bold commitment to halve our footprint by 2020, with the help of carbon credits. Looking to 2025, Nutreco and Trouw Nutrition are leading with a true commitment to reducing our carbon emission footprint, including significantly reducing our energy usage and the footprint of our procurement activities. We will also monitor our impact downstream at the farm through life-cycle assessments (LCAs). This will enable us to track other environmental impacts at the farm, such as nitrogen and phosphorous emissions.

Trouw Nutrition has been working on developing and implementing LCA tools and analysis capacity in a number of areas. This effort will eventually lead to systematic footprinting of our products and formulations, while beginning a gradual implementation of comparative footprints of farm scenarios once validation is complete for new and existing products and services, and an integration of footprints within procurement requirements.

Science Based Targets

In 2020, Nutreco committed to the Science Based Targets (SBT) initiative, to ensure that we are setting meaningful goals that are in line with the latest in climate science and will help us get ready for a lower-carbon future. For Trouw Nutrition, as part of Nutreco, this translates into a greenhouse gas reduction target of 30% for scope 1 & 2 emissions – those that are released directly through our operations or are created through the energy we purchase. We’ll achieve this target by focusing on energy reduction and renewable energy and making up the difference through the purchase of green electricity.

Much like other processing companies, however, the bulk of our emissions come from upstream in our supply chain. To address this, we have set a 38% reduction target by economic intensity (per € sold) of these scope 3 emissions, from a 2018 baseline by 2030. Scope 3 emissions are those created indirectly through our purchasing and usage of external services, yet dominated by the impact of crop production and land use change. To meet our scope 3 goal, we will continue working on deforestation-free sourcing, integrating novel ingredients and cooperating with stakeholders to reduce the footprint of commodities.

Trouw Nutrition will also start measuring its air transportation and logistics footprint, to develop a reduction plan. In summary, we will:

Commit to Science-Based Targets (targets to be defined in the process).
Implement LCA footprinting in feed formulations, in the innovation stage-gate process, and in procurement (as part of scope 3 for Science-Based Targets).
Develop footprinting capacity in our farm and formulation models to help customers measure and reduce their emissions.

Sustainable ingredients

By engaging Trouw Nutrition and our fellow operating company, Skretting, in surveys and interviews, Nutreco confirmed that the various regions of the world where we operate have different priorities and approaches around sustainability. When it comes to ingredients, the three main overall concerns are:

Deforestation-free
Low carbon footprint
Novel/circular ingredients (to reduce pressure on the food chain)

We strive to make progress on all three fronts. In December 2020, our Trouw Nutrition Procurement team has adopted a sustainable sourcing policy together with our fellow Nutreco division, Skretting, to eliminate deforestation risk in the supply chain. Our Formulation team is developing tools that will allow us to take the carbon footprint into account when formulating products. In 2021, we will work to put more structure around our approach to novel, so we can better validate their impact, and further develop a method for measuring our progress on the three topics.

Packaging

The packaging that helps protect and market our products has environmental impacts along the chain that stretches from the extraction of raw materials, through to product manufacturing, suppliers, retailers, consumers and beyond.

Our customers expect the products they purchase to be in perfect condition when they receive them. It is important to us that we ensure the packaging we use to protect products can easily be responsibly disposed of. We work to balance our use of packaging with the lowest possible environmental impact both in its production and disposal, with our need to deliver quality products and present our brands well.

Nutreco is committed to following best practices in packaging, by aligning its design and development with local waste processing capabilities while still providing product safety and shelf stability. We always aim to minimise any product or packaging waste to the environment.

To this end, our parent company encourages all procurement teams to engage their local customer base and waste handling associations to understand the outcome of the packaging waste produced, as well as their product packaging suppliers to explore ways of addressing plastic use, highlighting the incorporation of recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic in packaging. We will develop a Responsible Packaging Policy using this information.

In the years approaching 2025, Trouw Nutrition will first work on a policy to eliminate packaging waste in the environment, and then work to reduce the environmental burden of packaging production. To this end, we will:

Aim to have all packaging be 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable, to eliminate waste to the environment, and avoid single-use plastic when the local infrastructure permits an alternative. This is valid for both packed incoming goods (raw materials) and for the packed products Trouw Nutrition brings to the market.
Communicate with customers to learn about local practices and help influence them to use the best disposal practices.
Evolve and innovate our packaging (existing and new) to contribute to our commitment to reduce our carbon footprint by:

Using less material for each product (reducing packaging weight where possible)
Using more recycled and renewable materials in our packaging

Nutreco soy & oil palm ingredients sourcing policy

Deforestation is one of the major sustainability challenges for the agriculture and aquaculture sector. Soy and oil palm are major deforestation drivers, with over half a million hectares of rainforest, peatland and savannahs destroyed each year for the expansion of these crops. Learn more about Nutreco's industry-first soy and oil palm sourcing policy to prevent deforestation with Skretting's Global Procurement Director, Robert van den Breemer.

Check out our simple policy

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