Environment

Mark Lovett is apetito's Health, Safety and Sustainability Manager.
He explains some of our key environmental objectives and achievements so far:

"Sustainability does not exist in isolation - it impacts on every part of the business. I am proud of the progress we are making. I am also proud to be part of a business with such a demonstrable commitment to being a sustainable business. This is shown by the resources that the company is putting behind its sustainability programme.

We've already made real progress. However, to build on this, we have recently become corporate partners with Forum for the Future, which is the leading sustainable development charity working with companies such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco to bring about change. We're not working with them because they will give us an easy ride - their role is to inspire and challenge us to achieve even more.

We have also set ourselves targets for moving forward to a more sustainable future. Take a look at our 2012 Vision shown inside the back of this brochure. We think this represents a balanced and achievable programme focusing on the important issues that face us all.

We have already made much progress to date on our sustainability agenda, some of our key achievements and objectives so far are:
- Our 2012 aim is to send zero food and packaging waste to landfill. We're making good progress. Fourteen of our 16 waste streams are now recycled and we are working to resolve the final two. In 2007

apetito was in January 2008 a launch signatory of the "Federation House Commitment", a food industry initiative led by the Food & Drink Federation and Envirowise. This will help deliver an industry-wide target of reducing water use by 20 per cent by 2020 compared with 2007. At our principal manufacturing site in Trowbridge we consume about 100,000 cubic metres of water a year. As part of our commitment we are targeting to reduce our water usage (apart from that which goes into the food itself). We are aiming to do better than the industry 2020 target and are planning to save 5 per cent of our usage in year one of the commitment

- We are working with the Carbon Trust and have measured our carbon footprint. Industry comparators suggest that our footprint is already relatively low compared with similar operations but we have set targets to drive this down further.
- A key target of the Government's Food Industry Sustainability Strategy is to reduce substantially the amount of packaging received by households. None of our ready meals are sold with the cardboard sleeves that are widely used across the industry. We estimate that this policy avoided using 3,000 tonnes of cardboard in 2007.
- Our aluminium trays are produced using 99 per cent recycled material and our outer cartons from 90 per cent recycled material.
- We were certified to ISO14001 by the British Standards Institute in January 2007. This is the internationally recognised standard for environmental management systems. Achieving ISO14001 demonstrates how seriously we take our environmental commitments and shows our innovative and forward-thinking approach."

Mark Lovett
Health, Safety & Sustainability Manager