Sustainability

While sustainability is about measuring performance on the economical-, social- and environmental dimensions, the most significant operational and product aspects for Huhtamaki lie within the environmental dimension.

Operational sustainability

Operational sustainability means a constant effort towards a more eco-efficient manufacturing process. Each manufacturing unit’s sustainability performance is measured against long- and short-term targets using metrics for energy and material efficiency, emissions and effluent intensity derived from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI*). Sustainability performance is benchmarked internally in order to identify the issues in which the potential for improvement compared to resource input has the most attractive ratio.

During 2009, the operational environmental targets for year end 2011 were redefined for each segment in order to better support and strengthen the relevance of the targets and related performance indicators for the segment’s operations.

Product sustainability

Already in 2008, in an effort to gain further understanding of packaging sustainability performance profiles, Huhtamaki generated a substantial Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for rough molded fiber packaging. A tool rather than mere research results is needed to define effects of packaging. In 2009, within the Foodservice Europe-Asia-Oceania business segment, an LCA tool for assessing and portraying an article’s overall environmental performance was developed and will be used in proposing customer solutions.