The company with the corner on the macaroni & cheese market, Kraft Foods, released a fact sheet today to highlight the ways they are minimizing their environmental impact through waste reduction and recycling at their manufacturing plants. The company credits their employees for making “steady progress” across the globe. Overall, Kraft recycles or reuses about 90% of their manufacturing waste.

"We're waging war on waste, one plant at a time," said Christine McGrath, Vice President, Global Sustainability.  "Today, we have 36 facilities in 13 countries that send zero waste to landfills, and we've reduced our manufacturing waste by 50 percent since 2005.  Our strategy is simple: generate less waste and find new uses for the waste we do produce.  And our employees are doing just that."

Reduction isn't limited to those 36 zero-waste facilities, 24 in Europe and 12 in North America, but include several other plants that have drastically cut the amount they will have to send or have found other uses for the materials.

Their coffee plant in St. Petersburg, Russia “has reduced the amount of waste it sends to landfills by 90 percent”. The plant reuses coffee bean shipping bags and pallets. Instead of throwing out spent coffee grounds they will be turned into fertilizer for local farms to use.  Since 2011 another coffee plant in Austria “has been sending approximately 250 tons of chaff – used coffee bean husks – to a biomass power plant.”  The husks are used as a source for renewable energy that will power local homes. Coffee - it provides energy for humans and for Austrian Homes!  

Stateside, similar programs have had excellent results like in Wisconsin where the popular Philadelphia brand cream cheese is made. The plant partnered with the city of Beaver Dam in 2010 and 2011 to build an anaerobic digester. The digester turns a byproduct of cheesemaking, whey waste, into a biogas that provides electricity for the local power grid. The digester means the plant no longer has to dispose of the whey waste so it reduces their solid waste and it improves the wastewater. Kraft notes this is a “win-win for the plant, the city, its people and the environment.”

Three California plants have won awards for their waste reduction efforts. They have reduced waste to landfills by 26 percent since 2009 by separating recyclables and finding new uses for food waste. The plants have sent out over one hundred tons of food waste for reuse: for instance the Cornnuts plant sent out corn skins to be used an animal feed.

Kraft reported their revenue was $49.2 billion in 2010 and it's obvious from their “sustainability success stories” some of that revenue is being used to help the communities where their plants are located.