Page 14 - Food&Drink Business magazine September 2022

COVER STORY
waste you’re sending to landfill, or ways of becoming more efficient or streamlining transport,” she explains.
Miley adds, “When you’re looking at a wastewater project, for example, if you consider it end to end, you spend probably $5 per kilolitre or more purchasing clean water, heating, cooling, or running it from here to there. Then you spend another $5 per kilolitre treating it and discharging it.
It all adds up.”
THE SCOPE FOR CHANGE
At Hydroflux, the process began with calculating emissions and compiling a comprehensive emissions inventory. Then the company set about looking at ways to reduce them.
“Some of the steps are straightforward, dealing with Scope 1 emissions by transitioning to electric vehicles, for example. Or addressing Scope 2 emissions by shifting to a renewable electricity supply and other energy saving measures like changing the type of lighting in the offices,” Seddon explains.
Hydroflux already had a green travel policy in place, which meant all employees are provided with free public transport to and from work. It was updated to mandate that any air travel for work must be offset at point of purchase.
Reducing Scope 3 emissions is one of the biggest challenges for companies because of its scale and complexity.
“The National Greenhouse and Energy Report covers just
Scope 1 and 2. So for industry, that is generally natural gas, refrigeration, and electricity. Scope 3 is essentially everything else. Think of it in terms of all the good and services your company purchases – it’s the stationery, legal services, IT equipment, advertising and
all your suppliers. It is generally the biggest source of emissions for a company.
“From a Cress perspective, for many of our clients – and Hydroflux was no different – the bulk of their emissions are Scope 3, which is all about supply chain,” she says.
During its analysis, Hydroflux
found that the main area in which it would have to reduce emissions was its supply chain.
Hydroflux director John Koumoukelis says, “We are now asking our suppliers questions around carbon emissions and what they are doing to address those.”
It is no different for the food and beverage sector, with Seddon calling on the industry to push itself to the stage of looking at the supply chain collectively and working out what can be done to reduce emissions.
“If you’re in food and beverage buying fruit concentrate from 10 different countries, you drill down to a supplier level. It might come down to an individual farmer with a family to support. You really need to go to that level and understand what will make the difference for this supplier to, a) stay in business and b) become more sustainable.
“Sometimes it is something quite simple, like the length or type of contract or the contractual arrangements. Everyone needs some sort of certainty, a farmer needs to know that if they plant this crop, that company is actually going to buy it and then buy it again next year.
“Big companies understand their supply chain in depth and
many have done a lot of work around the sustainability of their entire value chain.
“And that is what everyone needs to do because our inputs are somebody else’s outputs, and our outputs are somebody else’s inputs. Everyone needs to be playing their part,” Seddon says.
It also takes in waste and as Seddon says, achieving zero waste to landfill is very difficult.
Hydroflux looked at each of its locations and then worked out what the realistic options were for recycling and diversion.
“Some offices are based in areas where this is no council collection of recyclables, so it came down to individual volunteers to take the recycling home. We went to that level even to the extent of collecting soft plastics for recycling.
“We’ve got better systems for that now and all that is left is finding a solution for contaminated waste and organics, that is one of our targets,” Seddon says.
OFFSET GOALS
Once the company reduced or eliminated what it could, it turned its attention to the best way it could offset remaining emissions.
Hydroflux has a charity
14 | Food&Drink business | September 2022 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au
SOURCE: LOVE MERCY