"It is great to see Mars taking active responsibility for packaging sustainability by providing a program for consumers to recycle candy wrappers. To date more one million candy wrappers and nearly six million FLAVIA® Freshpacks have been diverted from landfills in the U.S., with collections growing by the month."
Tom Szaky Terracycle
Quality packaging is critical for our products to travel from factory to store to home. It ensures longer-lasting freshness and prevents food from spoiling, enables efficient transport, identifies our brands and gives consumers important information.
But packaging also uses materials, such as metal, paper and plastics, and creates waste for disposal. We need to find solutions that allow us to deliver quality products while preserving resources, reducing the greenhouse gases created when making and transporting the packaging and limiting the amount that ultimately ends up in landfill.
We use a scientific approach to identify and measure the impacts of our packaging, which has helped us define our strategy and set appropriate targets to improve our performance. See Understanding Our Impacts.
We aim to reduce, recycle and rethink our packaging. We have set short-term targets to keep us focused and help improve our performance. Our targets are to:
- Reduce packaging weights by 10 percent by 2015, from a 2007 baseline, regardless of business growth
- Design our packaging to be 100-percent recyclable or recoverable by 2015, where infrastructure exists
- Increase the level of recycled content in our packaging by 10 percent by 2015, where possible given regulatory and food safety requirements
- Explore the use of alternative materials or change the pack itself in a manner consistent with food safety and on-pack informational needs
We are examining longer-term targets to ensure continued improvement.
Across all of our business segments, we used 785,892 tonnes of packaging in 2010, a 3 percent reduction from 810,975 tonnes in 2007.
Although it appears that we are more than halfway toward achieving our 2015 target of a 10 percent decrease, it is difficult to determine how much of the reduction is due to improved performance and how much is due to lower production levels. We need to make sure packaging tonnages do not increase when production picks up.
.JPG "Types of packaging used in 2010")
The search for alternative packaging materials is not always straightforward. For example, biodegradable polymers can have a higher environmental impact than our current materials. Renewable biopolymers made from sugar cane avoid the use of fossil fuels but can create competition with food crops. The full picture must be thoroughly examined using lifecycle assessments in order to ensure that we are not making progress in one direction, only to undermine it somewhere else. We continue to research alternatives that do not increase our impacts.
Our Packaging Sustainability Guidelines recommend that, wherever possible, we choose the lightest materials to do the job, reducing both materials and energy use. Mars Associates around the globe are helping to deliver on this challenge.
For example:
- In China, Wrigley updated the SKITTLES® product tube package. By removing excess material around the tube closure, the team was able to create a simpler design ― reducing the total plastic by 20 percent and saving 120 tonnes per year.
- Associates at Mars Petcare Brazil redesigned WHISKAS® cat food cans to deliver the same level of
nutrition in a smaller can, meaning we can use thinner steel and reduce the amount of metal wasted when making the can. As a result of these measures, the product now weighs from 340g to 290g less and requires 50 tonnes less steel each year to produce. We can also fit 384 more of the new cans on a pallet, which means delivering more products in fewer journeys — saving money and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from transport.
- Mars Food reduced the weight of DOLMIO® glass sauce jars in the U.K., saving 900 tonnes of glass annually. To further this effort, Mars Food worked with the U.K. government-backed Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to redesign the UNCLE BEN’S® sauce 500g jars and reduce their height. This has cut the weight of the jars by 6 percent and produced an additional savings of 525 tonnes of glass per year.
- Mars Food Australia has reduced the weight of the MASTERFOODS® herb and spice glass jars by 10 percent. Changing the backing paper to recyclable material for the MASTERFOODS® squeezy tomato sauce bottle labels reduced waste sent to landfill by 10 tonnes per year.
- Across Western Europe, Wrigley has removed all single stick paper labels from brands including the BIG RED®, DOUBLEMINT®, ORBIT® and SPEARMINT® brands. By removing the additional inner label, Wrigley saved more than 600 tonnes of paper in 2010. In 2011, we are expanding this approach to other regions to make further reductions.
