'The most sustainable portion packer!'

Sustainable portion packs? This regularly leads to varying reactions. Van Oordt The Portion Company dares to call itself ‘the most sustainable portion packer!’ To give a clear picture of this, we spoke to Iwan Hellemons and Sitah Heijnen from the sustainability team of the company. They want to tell you more about Van Oordt’s sustainability plan and the route it takes.

Iwan Hellemons and Sitah Heijnere are both working at Van Oordt The Portion Company. Sitah as sustainability officer and Iwan is responsible for purchasing. Together they have been working on the sustainability process for the organization for some time now. On one hand with drawing up a sustainability plan and the vision that Van Oordt wants to achieve, on the other hand with raw materials and packaging materials.

'The most sustainable supplier of portion packs'

Every year, Van Oordt The Portion Company supplies billions of portion packs to customers in the hospitality, hotel and healthcare industry. ‘The most beautiful packaging company in Europe’, says Sitah. What sets Van Oordt apart? ‘Sustainability!’ Iwan dares to say that Van Oordt is the most sustainable portion packer of Europe. ‘We want to do everything within our capabilities and more. Provided the customer really asks for a specific different material, we always go for a sustainable solution.’ According to Sitah, the organization even tries to opt for a sustainable solution for its own brands as a standard! ‘For example, for our own sugar sticks we try to comply with the Dutch paper recycling requirements, but also the European standards.'

According to Iwan there are more cases that ‘we won’t forget’, like the plastic wrap for our pallets. ‘We are currently working with a plastic wrap with a 50% reduction compared to the previous one. This film is more expensive, but has more stretch. This means that we need to use less material for one pallet.’ In addition, a significant step has been made for our own brand Elite biscuits in saving cardboard. By this Van Oordt has reduced cardboard for their biscuit boxes. Iwan indicates that these boxes have 'passed all quality tests' and this 'saves a considerable amount of cardboard.'

Sustainability ambitions & challenges

The sustainability team of Van Oordt has set up some sustainability goals, subdivided into several steps:

1. 20% packaging waste reduction in 2025
2. 100% recyclable packages for 2030
3. 50% CO2 reduction by 2030
4. Fully circular for 2050

Which steps have Van Oordt already made? ‘The part that we have already realized is, for example, our charging stations in front of the building, but also the closing of our warehouse in Belgium.’ At Van Oordt everything is arranged from one location. Iwan continues: ‘for our lease cars, we look at CO2 emissions. For example, there is no longer a diesel car in our fleet.’

Challenges of Van Oordt

To achieve the sustainability goals, the organization naturally faces several challenges. ‘We know what we want to achieve and that it will be a long road. But we keep going one step further. If you look at where we were a few years ago and where we are now, that makes a world of difference!', says Iwan.

When it comes to packaging, the organization may face more challenges compared to its competitors. Price plays a major role in this. Many companies struggle with choices they have to make. They want to choose for a sustainable solution, but due to price differences, this is not always easy. Sitah indicates that current alternatives are quite expensive. ‘Fortunately, the government is working hard to make sustainable solutions more attractive in price. But as long as this is not yet the case, it will remain a challenge for many of our customers and therefore also for us.'

Sustainability route

According to Iwan, the aim should be to keep going that one step further and keep improving. ‘As far as circularity is concerned, it is important to do keep doing this continuously.’ Sitah continues: ‘Actually, we are now 1 dimensional. You acquire material from somewhere, you use that and then it gets thrown away. But we want to become circular. Only then we will achieve our circularity goal.‘ Van Oordt The Portion Company is working hard on this goal. The organization aims to make all packaging fully recyclable and designed to use less plastic and use less plastic in the packaging.

Want to know more?

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