CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY PLAN AND CSR POLICIES: ILIP SETS ITS COMMITMENT OUT IN BLACK ON WHITE

ILIP’s numerous actions aiming to assure broad-ranging sustainability converge in the 2020-2022 Corporate Sustainability Plan and in the Corporate Social Responsibility policies.

ILIP’s commitment to sustainability keeps on renewing. Since 2002, the ILPA Group company has increased its environmental policies, based on principles of reduction, recycling and renewable resources. With the 2020-2022 Corporate Sustainability Plan and the CSR policies, ILIP has put its improvement targets down, black on white: to reduce its environmental impact throughout the value chain, from the raw materials through to the production plants and logistics, including the health and safety of workers and consumers alike.

It is an extensive approach to sustainability, which starts out from the company Code of Ethics and is inspired by the United National Sustainable Development Goals, ultimately aiming to sensitise the whole of the production ecosystem towards making aware choices, including suppliers, customers and, as far as possible, also end consumers.

ILIP guarantees the monitoring of its business: indeed key performance indicators (KPIs) have been defined for the Integrated Management System, which make it possible to control the performance of the company’s processes and commitments and which consider environmental sustainability as a decision-making element, on a par with technical and economic aspects. And this is not all: it also extends its corporate responsibility to include reducing occupational diseases and injuries, thanks to the constant development of a business culture aimed at preventing risk, integrating health and safety management into all business processes.

As part of these commitments, 2021 will also see the start-up of a new automatic warehouse equipped with an oxygen-reducing system and 60,000 pallet places: its position alongside the production plant will eliminate the need for transfers to external warehouses, which in 2019 alone clocked up more than 280,000 km, thereby helping avoid approximately 300,000 kg in CO₂ emissions.

The reduction in ILIP’s environmental impact includes reducing the raw materials used to produce food packaging. Since 2010, ILIP has been striving to lighten its products whilst maintaining their practicality, safety and hygiene, avoiding the use of more than 4,000 tonnes of raw materials.

A member of Save Food, the FAO initiative to combat food wastage, since 2012, ILIP is also in the process of carrying out research and development to design packaging that can increase the shelf-life of packaged products, thereby reducing waste.

Finally, for years now the company has been striving hard to make the transition to the circular economy in its use of PET to produce its food packaging; the company now recycles approximately 30,000 tonnes post-consumption PET per year in a closed system, avoiding the emission of 75 million kg CO₂ equivalent and guaranteeing the origin and traceability of the second raw materials processed. The 2014 EFSA authorisation makes it possible to also produce packaging containing up to 100% recycled PET for direct contact with food.

“We are one of the few European groups able to assure total control and closed cycle in PET recycling in all production phases required to produce new food packaging from rPET: from the selection of post-consumption material, to washing, grinding, extrusion and heat-forming. Our vision of the future takes concrete form in assuring, in food packaging, a complete transition away from the current linear economy and towards the circular economy” – declares Roberto Zanichelli, ILIP’s Business Development & Marketing Director.