Monday 17 July 2017

Tetra Pak Sdn Bhd Sustainability Initatives

8 Jun 2017

I was given an honour opportunity to attend Youth Empowerment Sustainable Consumption and Production (YESCP) Mini Workshop located at Petaling Jaya. I don't have any expectations for the activities in day 2. However, the talks and programmes given was very satisfying as I had to skip few classes during the 2 days of workshop.

I was appointed to write about the Tetra Pak Sustainability

Other than water sustainability, the topic sustainability that implemented by Tetra Pak really catches my attention. I was so adoring the effort made by the Tetra Pak Sdn Bhd to have sustainable food packaging while protecting the food inside it. I wish when I graduated I could be working in any company that have this kind of philosophy.

Tetra Pak was founded by Ruben Rausing, he was a firm believer that a package should save more than it costs. When food is packaged it can be transported and made available to consumers everywhere in a safe, efficient, and affordable way.

Tetra Pak was inspired to have the best packaging as best as the nature's best packaging, which is the egg shells concept. The mass of the egg shells is only made up of 10% of its mass. The egg shells also protect the nutrients inside the egg for a very long period of time. The shells also deliver food an ensures food safety. That inspiration is the golden goal of Tetra Pak company. As for now, the highest achievement that Tetra Pak achieved is 7% packaging and 93% product.

Tetra Pak not only protecting the food, but also protecting what's good. The term 'what's good' consists of the protecting the people and the futures, which including the sustinability issues seriously in their business.

Since this workshop is circulating around the sustainability issue, the speaker elaborates more on the protecting future.

Tetra Pak produced recyclable products and the raw materials are obtained from proper logging activities. The speaker introduced to us what the packaing is made of, and they do mention about the alumunium sheets within the packaging.

This caugt my attention since the aluminium sheets provide a very little carbon footprint. Although it is very little carbon footprint produced, the carbon footprint is still there.

Why aluminium sheets? To make the food last longer, and to reduce the cost of storage. If there is no aluminium sheet, they have to keep the food in freezer everywhere (during transportig the food, distribute to consumer, etc.), which consume spaces and money as well. However, research and development is made to figure out what is more relevant, more biological to replace the aluminium sheets, to reach zero carbon footprint.

The company keep growing, but they keep minimizing their impact to the Earth year by year.

Recycling became the main topic of this packaging. They claim that their products is not a waste. All parts of them are recycleable. There are some projects launched by the youth where they collecting the used package and recycled them to produced roofs for project kampung orang asli. It was an amazing effort, how we benefits to people in such way.

In my opinion since the packaging is lastly at the consumers' hands, the consumers should have awareness about the importance of recycling the packaging. Plus, the packaging is not unusual, it is used in many production of food. So the question is, how we are going to inculcate awareness about the importance of recycling among the consumers?


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