Boosting circularity
ROYAL CANIN®’s work to minimize our environmental impact, includes making our packaging better.
Packaging has two roles:
It must maintain our products’ excellence - protecting and preserving content to the highest levels in order to ensure food retains its full quality and health benefits.
It must communicate important information, such as nutritional data, feeding guidelines and legally required information.
We have been working hard for many years, accelerating in the last five, to develop, source, test, manufacture and roll out packaging globally that meets those needs, and is also more circular. Our ambition for 2030 is 100% packaging designed for circularity, and in the same period reduce the plastic weight in our product portfolio from 60% to 30%. We’re taking action to support the circular economy through investments and innovation across various countries, working towards a world where packaging material never becomes waste, but is reused, recycled or composted, to lessen our footprint.
Our strategy in 3 points:
ROYAL CANIN® is committed to addressing systematically and thoughtfully the multifaceted challenges of packaging. Since 2020, we have gained valuable insights and identified our current position in the journey toward enhancing packaging circularity while maintaining quality standards. We have been working to shift our global packaging portfolio from multi material to mono material where possible, a crucial step to boost what can be recycled where local infrastructure exists.
Packaging that is made up of multiple different materials such as plastic, paper and aluminium can’t be sorted into a single material recycling stream. This is why we’re working to remove multi material packaging from our portfolio and shifting to mono-material packs where possible.
Redesigning a package so that it uses just one material may seem simple but can be difficult to achieve. Each of the layers adds a functionality and a performance, such as barrier performance, mechanical resistance, and printability. Replacing these materials requires ground-breaking, innovative material science, which is the daily work of our employees in partnership with our suppliers.
At ROYAL CANIN® , we strive to do better every day, so that we can support pet owners not only in looking after their pets’ health, but also the health of the planet. Proper disposal of packaging is a way of reducing your impact on the environment. So, for your pet's well-being, consider it.
We’re proud to be leading the way in providing a solution to recycle pet food packaging through our Royal Canin Recycling Program in partnership with TerraCycle in Australia and New Zealand. Royal Canin has partnered with TerraCycle since May 2021. TerraCycle helps to recycle products and packaging that would otherwise end up in landfill or being incinerated.
We are actively working to drive true systems change through partnerships with governments, NGOs, suppliers, packaging developers, and industry. We are investing in recycled content and signaling our intent to buy in order to drive new investments in recycling technologies. And we’re calling for the improvement of these systems through legislation and industry collaboration to ensure adequate supply of food-safe recycled content.