Packaging
Packaging is essential to ensure that our customers can enjoy safe, high-quality products. We also know that creating a sustainable future requires reducing the impact of packaging and therefore we are making progress by using less material, making sustainable design choices and enabling circular solutions.
Material Reduction
Reducing materials not only improves our environmental footprint, it also creates efficiencies for our business. We continue to reduce packaging material, progressing to our 2030 goal to eliminate 25 million pounds of packaging materials. Our efforts extended beyond continuous improvement initiatives to identify broader reduction opportunities.
Circularity Improvements
We recognize the importance of and remain focused on improving the circularity of our packaging portfolio and mitigating our impact through material choices and design improvements. At the same time, solving for flexible plastics continues to be a challenge due to limited recycling infrastructure and availability of scaled recyclable material solutions.
Given these challenges, our packaging strategy is designed to be responsive to the realities of the evolving infrastructure and regulatory landscape, while continuing to explore emerging solutions that drive circularity.
Our focus areas include:
- Implementing Sustainable Design Principles
- Converting, where applicable, to mono-material packaging to improve recyclability
- Increasing recycled content in appropriate applications
- Eliminating PVC from our packaging portfolio
Waste Reduction
At Hershey, we recognize the importance of waste reduction to environmental stewardship.
Effective waste management is essential to protecting natural resources and helping our business. It enables us to:
- Reduce demand on landfills and limit impact from waste disposal
- Improve reuse, and avoid the need for new resources to make new things
- Reduce costs by reusing resources or generating income by selling waste for beneficial use
We understand that what we see as waste may have value for others and has the potential to be repurposed. This understanding underpins our approach to recycling and our work to extend circular economy initiatives in our operations.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Our waste management strategy is simple — comply with applicable laws and regulations and do what we can to be less wasteful throughout our network and supply chains.
Employees consistently seek new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle materials, and we work closely with our Green Teams to keep waste management front-of-mind.
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