Materials and waste
We work every day with our suppliers, clients and customers to reduce organic and non organic waste. Through cooperation and education upstream and downstream, we manage to reduce our waste disposal significantly.
In our environmental strategy and improvement programme 2010-2013, we have set ourselves the following key objectives:
To standardise waste management practices across our business by August 2012
50% increase in food waste recovery at clients' sites against 2009/10 baseline data by August 2012
20% reduction in average packaging weight per stock keeping unit (SKU) below a 2007 baseline by December 2012
Organic waste
Our starting point to tackle organic waste is increasing communication with employees and customers to raise awareness of the issue, while continuing to build dialogue with suppliers, NGOs and other organisations dedicated to organic waste reduction.
Our efforts include both increasing the number of sites that measure the amount of waste they generate and seeking to reduce it through better portion control and efficient procurement. We also have an environmental objective to increase the number of sites that recover food waste. We offer a range of food waste recovery options like aerobic digestion (AD), in-vessel composting, food drying machines, and waste to energy, available either on-site or transported to a special food waste treatment site.
Our UK food production business, Tillery Valley, delivers surplus fit for consumption food to FareShare, the national food poverty and food redistribution charity thus diverting waste from landfill and benefitting local community charities like centres for homeless people, refugee centres, rehabilitation centres, hostels and youth centres. We continue to encourage our suppliers to divert their fit-for-consumption surplus food to FareShare.
We have shared our organic waste data with WRAP, the leading UK NGO dedicated to reducing food waste.
Coffee grounds for your plants
Find out how you can use recovered coffee grounds as compost material in your garden.
Non organic waste
We are working with our suppliers and clients to reduce the packaging used on Sodexo sites and support initiatives to recover packaging materials.
Our upstream efforts remain focused on tracking packaging reduction initiatives and identifying further opportunities by engaging with core vendors.
Sodexo works with partners to prevent waste, promote recycling and find a market for material we need to discard. The non organic material we cannot reuse within the business and which we have responsibility for is processed at specialist recycling facilities where it is considered a resource wherever possible. This means its value is kept in the marketplace and the environmental impacts of landfill avoided. We train our employees to high standards to use products and equipment properly and minimise waste.
