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Sustainability

Our Commitment

To continuously improve the sustainability of our packaging and provide innovative solutions to meet our customers’ sustainability goals.

Design for Environment

One of our key priciples at Sonoco is to Design for Environment. This means putting sustainable practice at the core of our production processes.

 

Our Design for Environment thinking includes:

  • Packaging optimisation – creating the right size package for the product
  • Use of alternate materials and recycled content where appropriate to the packed product
  • Elimination of undesirable materials through utilisation of closures designed with non-BPA coatings and compounds, as well as solvent-free adhesives
  • Ensuring that each package has an end-of-life recovery option

Want to learn more about Sonoco’s corporate commitment to shrinking the environmental footprint of the Company? Click the link below to visit our Corporate Sustainability page.

Our Commitments

Taking real steps to reduce our environmental impact.

It’s easy to talk about sustainability, but we’re commited to taking action to achive the following goals through 2020:

  • Reduce normalised global energy usage by 1% annually, which we believe will result in a further 1% reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) or reducing GHG emissions by 5% through 2020.
  • Reduce normalized water usage by 5% through 2020.
  • Achieve Sonoco Sustainability Star award status at an additional 10% of the Company’s operations by significantly diverting landfill wastes. Also, continue working with our customers to demonstrate total landfill diversion from their operations in North America and Europe.
  • Demonstrate further improvement in employee safety, diversity and engagement.
Case Studies
Premier Foods reduce gravy Bisto’s environmental impact

Premier Foods reduce gravy Bisto’s environmental impact

Sonoco’s fully recyclable paperboard packaging solution will help Premier Foods to remove 40 tonnes of packaging used for its best-selling gravy Bisto drum, as it aims to reduce its environmental footprint.
LEGO Hero Factory Toys

LEGO Hero Factory Toys

Sonoco's Flexible Packaging business designs and manufactures the flexible stand-up pouches used to package LEGO’s Hero Factory toys in our Poland facility. This conversion from both plastic and paperboard packaging resulted in a minimum 75 percent weight reduction of the various package sizes offered.
Sonoco Alcore and ACE UK Open Carton Recycling Facility

Sonoco Alcore and ACE UK Open Carton Recycling Facility

Sonoco Alcore and the Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (ACE) UK have opened a beverage recycling facility in Stainland, West Yorkshire. When the facility reaches full capacity in July, it will be the first time in seven years that the United Kingdom has had a place to recycle its beverage cartons. The new facility can recycle 25,000 tons of cartons, nearly half of the approximately 60,000 tons of paper-based cartons used in the UK each year. In additional to municipal recycling, Heathrow Airport, which generates around 110,000 tonnes of waste a year, 2.5% of which is coffee cups, is looking to recycle at the beverage recycling plant as well. Sonoco Alcore will use the paperboard layers from the recycled cartons to produce coreboard, used to make tubes and cores for consumer and industrial applications, such as cling film, textiles and paper.

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