May 16, 2011

Arla meets dairy roadmap targets in advance

Arla Foods is on track to hit many of the 2015 Dairy Roadmap targets earlier than the planned schedule, having met the 2010 targets comfortably.

Arla's sustainability manager, Richard Laxton, said that the company's strong environmental position is due to the dairy industry's leading environmental strategy that it launched in December, which dovetails perfectly with the ambitions of the Dairy Roadmap.

"Our environmental strategy is the first in the industry to incorporate both our operations and those of our supplying farmers," said Laxton.

"We have set ourselves some challenging targets and our goal is to achieve emissions targets which meet or exceed climate change and key voluntary agreements."

Arla led the industry when it was the first to incorporate 15% recycled plastic into its polybottles in October last year, 50% above the set target of 10%, and as well as working hard to hit the 30% goal by 2015, the company aims to include 20% recycled plastic in its bottle caps too, although this is dependent on recyclate supply.

When it comes to adopting environmental management systems, each individual Arla processing site has been certificated to both ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 since 2007. In 2006, all the company's dairies began working with the carbon management programme, Carbon Desktop. The system, which monitors energy usage, allows precise targeting of areas of high consumption which enables the generation of significant utility savings, is being upgraded at the start of June.

The new-look system will highlight changes clearly in consumption patterns and also provide enhanced on month and on year comparisons allowing Arla's carbon action teams, which have been mobilised at each site, to monitor the effect of their carbon reduction initiatives more easily.

Arla also expects to hit the 2015 Dairy Roadmap zero production waste to landfill target three years ahead of schedule, with two of its six sites already reusing, recycling or recovering all of their solid wastes.

In collaboration with Lindhurst Engineering and the University of Nottingham, Arla has recently unveiled an innovative and pioneering microbial fuel cell (MFC) which is predicted, with further development, to revolutionise energy generation on farms and within the dairy industry by converting both farm slurry and dairy effluent into electricity.