Boosting circularity
Our 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 that meets those needs, and is also more circular. Our ambition is to develop packaging that’s reusable, recyclable or compostable, and increase post-consumer recycled content in our plastic. We’re taking action to support the circular economy through investments and innovation, 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:
We are 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 packaging portfolio from multi-material to mono material, a crucial step to boost what can be recycled.
Packaging that is made up of multiple materials such as plastic, paper and aluminum can’t be sorted into a single material recycling stream. This is why we are working to remove multi-material packaging from our portfolio and shifting to mono material packs, which can be more easily sorted and recycled in all types of recycling methods where necessary infrastructure exists.
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 Associates 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.
In the United States and Canada, we encourage the collection and recycling of selected bags via collection points. In these countries our type of bags cannot be recycled in the existing infrastructures, thus we initiated a partnership with TerraCycle® to set up collection points at different locations within the communities, including veterinary clinics, pet retailers and other points of sale and encourage consumers to return their packaging after use.
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.