International food and drink group, Princes, has published food waste data for its global operations, reporting that just 1.6% of total food handled by the business was wasted in the year to March 2021. Globally, Princes reduced overall food waste by 12.84% since last year, and 4% across the Group’s UK sites.
Of the 69,456 tonnes of food waste generated across Princes’ global operations, 20,636 tonnes were sent to anaerobic digestion plants to be converted to energy, while 45,726 tonnes were used for animal feed. Additionally, 202 tonnes were redistributed to charities including FareShare, the UK’s leading food waste and hunger charity.
As a signatory to the Champions 12.3 coalition of organisations dedicated to accelerating progress towards tackling global food waste, Princes has adopted the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3 – “By 2030, halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses”. Princes is also committed to maintaining zero to landfill waste across its UK operations, and accelerating progress towards achieving this across all international operations.
David McDiarmid, Corporate Relations Director at Princes, said: “As one of the UK’s leading grocery brands and food and drink manufacturers, we have a clear responsibility to address the issue of food waste from farm to fork, and take it very seriously. In the last year we have continued to make good progress across our global operations, during what was of course a very challenging year for colleagues at our sites. This work is very much ongoing, as we continue to explore all opportunities to accelerate further action to reduce waste, and ensure that whatever we have is re-purposed.”
“Partners, including WRAP, whose inaugural Food Waste Action Week we supported earlier this year, have highlighted the role that food waste plays in climate change. This is why food waste targets are included in our 2030GreenGoals sustainability programme for our factories, as we strive to meet our company vision to ‘Proudly help families to eat well without costing the Earth’.
As well as taking action in our own operations, we will continue to engage our suppliers to target, measure and act on their waste, and must also continue to raise awareness among consumers to help them reduce waste in the home.”
Continued progress to reduce waste and reuse materials is key to Princes’ 2030GreenGoals initiative, which outlines the Group’s ambition to cut food waste by 50% through prevention and positive use and become a carbon neutral business across its UK and international operations by 2030. This pledge builds on important progress made since 2014/2015 to reduce the Group’s carbon emissions, which represents a 23% decrease of over 34,000 tonnes of CO2.
