43 tonnes of CO2 reduction with improved waste management

In line with our ambition to reduce our carbon emissions, some significant improvement has been made in our production sites. Despite much increased volumes in 2020, waste is down overall by 4%.

Improvements in the Tumba factory
The biggest improvement was achieved in the Tumba Factory by reducing the waste of corrugated paper and soft packaging with 25%. This has given a nearly 34 tonne reduction in CO2 emissions. To put this in perspective 25 tonne CO2 emissions is about the same amount as 133 one-way flights from Stockholm to Hamburg. 

“There is a strong lead and commitment among the team members and leaders to find and highlight excessive use of material and transportation, in a structured way. The result is truly fantastic and motivates everybody to continue with improving the way of handling even further”, says Gustav Nordlander, Manager Production Planning Europe.

Reducing waste has been on the agenda in the Tumba factory for many years where all steps of the process are carefully considered. The extraordinary result from last year mainly comes from replacing the packaging methods on material from our main suppliers in Poland.

– Cardboard boxes for bulky metal sheets have been replaced with metal carriers (a return system) that protects the material better and also improves the handling.

– Reusable fabric covers have replaced large amounts of cardboard boxes and plastics previously used to protect the metal sheets.

An ongoing challenge is packaging of smaller parts in standard boxes which is common in a high degree of automisation – a trend in many warehouses. By finding a clever trade-off in ordering quantities compared to cost/packaging the reduction of CO2 impact can continue.   

Previous improvements in our European Distribution Centre, Gallin

Wastes	Site	Reduction in kg	Reduction of CO2 emission kg
Carton board waste	Milking, Poland	-8 000	-6 740.64
Reduced corrugated paper + soft plastic by 25% by working with packaging from supplier	Tumba, Sweden	-40 000	-33 703.2
Reduction of carton boxes by phasing out 2L packaging with detergents for the Polish market.	Detergents, Poland	-3 000	-2 527.74
Cardboard box reduction. Reusing the carton boxes from Gallin	Brazil	-500	-500
TOTAL			-43 471.58*