Reducing and managing waste

Effective waste management is one of our longstanding ESG foundation activities. We achieved zero waste to landfill across all UK operations in 2023, and that’s our baseline for the future.

Our approach has been to remove or minimise the use of resources in the first instance and then to maximise the amounts of waste that we can Reuse, Recycle and Recover using the principles of the Waste Hierarchy.

We achieved zero to landfill through the Recycling of Plastics, Aggregates, Wood and Cardboard and through diverting our Low Grade wood, Food and Residual Wastes to Anaerobic Digestion, Biomass and Waste to Energy Plants, respectively.

We are now working to develop more challenging targets for the future which concentrate on opportunities for reuse and recycling of waste streams that have previously gone to energy recovery.

Highly efficient production is one of our strategic aims as it gives us a competitive cost advantage. Over the years we’ve invested in efficient production machinery and in software that takes the constantly changing production mix and maximises the number of panels that we can get from each sheet of chipboard.

Nevertheless, the sheer scale of our manufacturing operations means that we still generate a lot of sawdust waste. At our Runcorn and Howden factories, we have invested in biomass boilers which burn this waste to produce heat. They allow us to reuse waste and they save us the cost of the equivalent bought-in fuel.

In a typical year, we convert over 10,000 tonnes of sawdust into energy in our biomass boilers. This is enough sawdust to fill 13 Olympic swimming pools, and it would otherwise have to have been transported elsewhere to be recovered. Using it to heat our factories saves us money. The typical amount of energy generated by our biomass boilers each year is equivalent to the average electricity consumption of almost 9,000 households.