Our company produces products for food-contact, preparing and saving your food is in our DNA and makes our products a necessity in every (professional) kitchen. And that is where we are having a major impact on our plant, our products are reducing the spilling of our valuable food products. For example with less than 1 gram of clingfilm, you can keep your 4 kg melon fresh for several days in your fridge. That is truly sustainable for our planet.
But of course we also have our own responsibility towards our planet, and that is why we are about to invest in a huge sustainability project with 4 million Euro’s in order to reduce our own carbon footprint by saving energy and even recovering it. Here are some of the things we are going to do in the next two years, and some have already started.
In the first phase, colleagues might have already seen the developments, we are moving our chemical warehouse outside the building and on that location we are creating the heart of our energy-balance structure, which allows us to work without gas in the future. We are also fortifying the construction of the building for the installation of the 2nd and the 3rd fase of our sustainability project. We are also removing and replacing the insulation on parts of the roof of the production halls. The investment in this phase is about 1.4 Mio Euro’s.
In phase 2 we are going to use the earth temperatures on about 200m depth in our earth to cool in the summer and heat in the winter, thus creating an energy balance and using the energy of or earth. We are drilling holes and adding piping to it and connecting pumps in order to facilitate the transfer of geo-thermic energy. Of course the pumps are also sourcing energy and that is where phase 3 is going to start. This project will also cost around 1.4 million Euro.
In phase 3 we are going to install a total of well over 2000 solar panels on our roof in order to create our own energy and reduce our carbon food-print. This will be one of the largest installations within our community and this will help us to keep the possibility of growing our capacity in the future, because our customers are asking more and more products from us. The result is in fact the balance of generated and purchased energy is changing and that we can add green electricity in order to get a 100% sustainability energy consumption with 2 years’ time.
On top of this ITS will also be in contact with all its’ suppliers to ask them to follow the same route and work on more sustainable production on their side as well. The target is in fact the decarbonization of all our products, thus creating a sustainable future for our product groups across the European markets.