Birds Eye targets zero to landfill

Food company Birds Eye has made savings and improved its environmental performance after working with ecosurety on its waste and recycling.

The waste and recycling service launched in January 2014 and offers end-to-end management of all waste streams for the best environmental and financial outcomes.

Birds Eye, owned by Igloo Foods Group, operates from a single site in Lowestoft and generates over 130,000 tonnes of food and packaging annually, plus significant quantities of other recycling, including used cooking oil that can be turned into biodiesel.

Challenging target

It is targeting zero-waste-to-landfill by 2015 and finance manager Matt Partridge says the move to ecosurety was seamless and generated savings from the start.

“ecosurety works with the waste managers and recyclers, so moving over was easy: for the most part it is the same companies doing the pick-ups from our site, but under ecosurety's watchful and informed eye,” he said.

“ecosurety's scrutiny, reporting tools, simplified invoicing and transparent business model are all helping to cut costs and cut waste, and to work more efficiently. We had waste-related savings of several thousand pounds racking up quickly, and expect to deliver a big saving by the end of the financial year.”

Open-book terms

ecosurety handles UK waste regulations compliance for many of the world’s leading producer-companies , but the service for Birds Eye takes things further.

Phil Newbury, waste and resource manager for ecosurety, said: “Our waste and recycling service is run on open-book terms so Birds Eye can see just what it is getting and where the savings and efficiencies are delivered. It covers every aspect of getting value from waste and from recycling. We are helping Birds Eye to segregate waste effectively, are training their staff to do the right things, and we’ve got scrutiny of the collecting companies too: what they do with the waste they take and the costs associated, whether its cardboard packaging, cooking oil going away for reprocessing and reuse or food waste heading to anaerobic digestion plants.”

One-stop shop

Birds Eye’s Matt Partridge added: “ecosurety acts like a one-stop-shop for waste management. We’ve got supplier transparency, out-of-hours contacts to resolve any issues, fantastic reporting tools and dashboards to track all our KPIs, and the prospect of our single, diverse site generating profit from waste quite quickly. To achieve that, based on our 130,000 tonnes of waste across the site, would be quite something, but with ecosurety it’s a realistic goal. And if we achieve it, the nature of the partnership we’ve forged together means we both win.” 

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