JDE’s Global Environmental Policy includes our Global Environmental Management System (GEMS), our standard operating system for manufacturing, and ISO 14001 as the tools to drive continuous improvement, helping the business to integrate key environmental aspects. 

​Together, these policies, systems, and procedures ensure we pay constant attention to reducing waste and optimizing natural resources and energy usage to minimize our environmental impact. 

​Our commitments in this area include the following: ​

• Comply with or exceed applicable environmental legal requirements and JDE company standards;
• Continue to improve our environmental performance in a sustainable manner that respects the earth and its finite resources; 
• Work with our suppliers and engage in dialogue with members of our global community to make sound sustainable progress.

The way our coffee and tea products are packaged is critical to ensuring their great taste, freshness, safety, and to maximising the consumer’s experience, but we recognise it also has an environmental impact which must be limited.

That’s why we are rethinking the way we package our products to reduce the amount of packaging material without compromising on its product quality. Where packaging is required, we are working on providing consumers with responsibly packaged products and optimised end of life solutions, including:

• Addressing plastic waste and pollution by moving towards packaging designed to be recyclable or compostable.
• Increasing the amount of recycled content to support the circular economy.
• Creating solutions enabling the reuse of our packaging wherever possible.

In 2019, 87% of our primary and secondary packaging was either recyclable or compostable, and 28% of our packaging came from recycled materials.

We strive to reduce waste in all our manufacturing processes and to eliminate it wherever possible.

Since 2013, we were able to reduce total waste produced by our manufacturing facilities by 15% per tonne of production since 2013. Waste to landfill per tonne was reduced by 73% since 2013. 19 of our manufacturing facilities were landfill free in 2019.

This progress has been achieved through a wide array of efforts to raise awareness and invest in new technologies. For example, 5 manufacturing facilities have been equipped with spent ground burners to convert spent coffee grounds to energy for use in production. In 2019, we incinerated approximately 123,000 tonnes of coffee grounds, up from 101,000 tonnes in 2013.

We are focused on reducing our energy use and greenhouse gas emissions across our operations to lessen our environmental impact.

Since 2013, we have reduced the energy intensity of our manufacturing processes by 10% or more for many of our main categories, like single-serve or instant coffee production. Based on our 2013 volume mix, we reduced our manufacturing energy consumption by 10.5% per tonne of production overall.

However, increasing consumption and consumer demand for more energy-intensive products have led to changes in the relative weight of categories in overall production since 2013. This has resulted in an increase of 5% of our energy consumption per tonne of overall production between 2013 and 2019. At the same time, we were able to reduce our GHG emissions per tonne of production by 0.4% over the same period.

Using water efficiently and ensuring our wastewater is treated adequately to avoid any negative environmental impact are important to us.

At our manufacturing facility near St Petersburg, Russia, for example we were able to reduce daily water consumption by 15% by the end of 2019 versus 2018.

Nevertheless, reducing water use remains a challenge for us. Increasing consumer demand for more water-intensive instant coffee and manufacturing facilities from recent acquisitions have led to an increase of water withdrawal per tonne of overall production by 23% since 2013. We will continue to invest in awareness building and technical innovations to reverse this trend.