No-one can ignore the extent of the environmental crisis facing humanity. There is an urgent need to reduce our environmental footprint in order to preserve our planet for future generations. Puratos considers this as an opportunity to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, water consumption and waste generation. We have clear objectives: become CO2 neutral by 2025 and water balanced by 2030.
To become carbon neutral by 2025, Puratos aims to REDUCE its impact and COMPENSATE what we cannot yet reduce. A two-pronged strategy:
1) Our reduction goal, inside our fence, is to reduce by 25% our impact by improving our energy efficiency and producing renewable energy on site.
2) Our compensation goal, outside our fence, is divided in 2 categories.
For the production of our products we need water. Even when there is no water in our product itself, we need water to clean our machines. So we need to use water smartly and when we discharge water, we should not pollute. Water balance is the concept where the amount of water that we give back to nature is equal to the amount of water used for our production.
In order to become water balanced, we have several action points we work on:
Andenne is preparing a project to reuse the water discharge from our wastewater treatment plant.
This project, planned for 2019-2020, should create a 30% reduction in site water consumption and therefore 5% of the total consumption of Puratos.
In the Belcolade factory, 20% of the site water consumption comes from the recovery of rainwater, this is the double of 2018.
Lummen has acquired a brand-new anaerobic reactor that doubles its processing capacity to support the increase in production volumes.
Andenne installed a fish pond at the outlet of its treatment plant to demonstrate the quality of the effluents discharged. Also in China, our production facility has a pond where you can see the fish swim as a visible proof of the water quality level.
Many water risks arise from external factors, such as local environmental conditions and, public water policy and management. Our aim is to support public water governance and to identify, quantify and reduce the quantitative and qualitative risks linked to water in our main factories. Nine production sites in high water stress areas, representing 55% of Puratos’ water supply, have completed a local water risk assessment to define an action plan. The sites evaluated included all Belgian sites, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and Pennsauken. A tool and a methodology on water related risks have been defined, allowing a transparent, structured and common approach.
In 2020 Puratos invested to upgrade our wastewater treatment capacity and to reduce our water consumption, with the ambition to reduce as much as possible the use of plastic, to stimulate the reuse of materials whenever possible and to sort waste fractions as optimally as possible in order to allow recycling. We aim to:
At Puratos we have developed several solutions that help consumers to reduce the amount of food they throw away.
Our ambition is to become fully recyclable or reusable in terms of packaging materials by 2025, with a deep focus on helping our customer reducing their environmental footprint. We aim to:
Baking and chocolate making are among mankind’s oldest and most valued skills. We take great pride in preserving this heritage.
Our commitments to you and to future generations