March 12, 2010

UK dairy sector enhances green initiative

Dairy UK has released an update to its environmental initiative to help make the dairy sector even greener.

Dairy UK has enhanced its pioneering environmental benchmarking system which identifies best practices and processes and help users to adapt and implement them. Metrics include energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, packaging and waste.

Commenting on the initiative, Dairy UK Environment Manager, Fergus McReynolds said, "Data collected through this system will not only help individual processing sites to improve, but will feed into our Annual Sustainability Report and track the sector's progress towards targets set out in the Milk Roadmap."

Last year, Dairy UK collected data on well over 60% of the total milk processed in the UK which demonstrated that the industry is well on its way to meet targets set out in the Milk Roadmap with significant reductions in water and energy use as well as diverting over 75% of the waste from site away from landfill.

"This year, we are hoping to build on that success; demonstrating the industry's continued commitment to reducing our environmental footprint," he said.