Cooperatives-based retail business, offering food and consumer goods, a market leader in Finland, with operations also in Russia and Estonia. Products sold in a variety of different consumer packages, including different types of plastics packaging.

Europe: Eastern Europe, Northern Europe

We created a new requirement that forbids undetectable carbon black in the PL product packaging and EPS in PL food packaging. We eliminated remaining single-use plastic cutlery and continued to eliminate unnecessary packaging materials, in 2020 in a total of over 50 PL Products. E.g. in fresh fruits and vegetables, we reduced plastic for 3 tons by substituting plastic with carton. In addition, by changing a plastic meat tray to a lighter solution, we made a total saving of 80 tons of plastic in one year. In the frozen berries and vegetables category, by reducing the thickness of the packaging, we reduced a total of 23 tons of plastic in one year. We scaled up a collaboration with a local plastic item producer, where carbon black plastic of our B2B flowerpots is reused as raw material for new products. For years, we have had criteria in place for harmful plastics: PVC and oxo-degradable plastics in PL packaging, and micro-plastics in PL cosmetic products and detergents are forbidden.

We aim to continue our efforts to reduce any unnecessary packaging, lightweighting packaging when possible, and substituting non-recyclable packaging with recyclable solutions. We continue to eliminate the last remaining EPS and black plastic packaging by 2022. We will also scale up the use of reusable models in logistics, especially in fresh fruits and vegetables. We will also develop the recyclability of our pastry bags, by substituting PLA plastic windows with paper.

Recent or in-progress pilots of reuse models for new products or packaging, Reuse models in place for non-consumer facing packaging, Reuse models in place for consumer facing products or packaging

Product line(s) with reuse model(s): 3 (3% of total) (see endonotes for more information)

Market(s) where reuse models are available today: Eastern Europe, Northern Europe (100% of total)

We continued offering reusable shopping bag alternatives to our customers and included a new reusable textile shopping bag in 2020. We continued offering reusable bags for fruit and vegetables in our stores, as well as a deposit shopping bag in few cities. We also still have an app with purchasing data for our customers, where they can easily monitor how many single-use shopping bags they purchase. During 2020 the sales of single-use plastic bags stayed stable, while our total sales increased. For specific detergent products we offer a refill packaging, so that consumers can reuse and refill the bottles. In logistics, the use of reusable plastic boxes for fresh fruit and vegetables increased by 13% in 2020 in comparison to the previous year, thus substituting the use of single-use boxes: in total we used 16 million reusable boxes in 2020. We started discussions for potential collaboration with a local business offering reuse models for take-away food.

Piloting reuse models for new products or packaging: 5 pilots

Introducing or expanding reuse models for non-consumer facing packaging

Introducing or expanding reuse models for consumer facing products/packaging

We are in active collaboration with industry peers and officials nationally with an aim to decrease the use of single-use take-way food containers and substituting these with reuse models.

In 2020, we introduced new criteria for Private Label products packaging to eliminate non-recyclable materials: in other words, carbon black and EPS plastic are now forbidden in our packaging and the few remaining packaging with these materials are being eliminated. We aim to have all packaging recyclable by 2022, and have identified the non-recyclable packaging in our portfolio with an aim to find functional recyclable packaging solutions to substitute these, without an impact to product quality or causing food loss.

We continued our long-term project to add clear sorting instructions to the packaging of PL products: there are found now in nearly all our 2000 PL product packaging. We communicated about the importance of packaging waste recycling. These actions aim to help consumers to sort packaging waste correctly, increase understanding on recycling and the national recycling and composting rates. In 2020, we scaled up a project with a local plastic item producer that now reuses the raw material of undetectable carbon black plastic of our B2B flowerpots to manufacture new products. We continued a long-term collaboration with the local Packaging recycling organisation: over 420 supermarkets have recycling containers for household packaging waste.

No - We used a local approach (assessing recyclability country by country for all our packaging) and provided additional evidence of the recycling rate (30%) threshold being met in specific markets (see endnotes for more information).

100% reusable, recyclable or compostable

We aim to eliminate the few remaining EPS and black plastic packaging. We aim to have all packaging recyclable by 2022, and have identified the non-recyclable packaging in our portfolio. Our aim is to continue collaborating with our suppliers so that we can find functional recyclable packaging solutions to substitute the non-recyclable alternatives, without a negative impact on product quality or causing food loss. We also aim to develop a more focused approach on specific details that have an impact on recyclability, such as glues or size of colour-printed areas in packaging.

We will continue to scale up the collaboration project with a local plastic item producer, so that the B2B flowerpots made of undetectable carbon black plastic can be reused as raw material for cleaning items. We aim to continue our external communications about the importance of household sorting of plastic for recycling. We are also an active member of a national material efficiency initiative where we are committed to increase material recycling. We also continued a long-term collaboration with the local Packaging recycling organisation so that consumers can sort their household packaging waste in our supermarkets.

We have continued our efforts in increasing the share of recycled content in our packaging. The share of recycled content in our shopping bags increased from 63% up to 88% during the year 2020. We also substituted virgin fossil-based plastic in the packaging of various product lines, in total in over 50 specific Private Label product packaging during 2020. For example, while using recycled content in the packaging of detergent bottles, we save up to 10 tons of virgin plastic in a year. Also, in various PET bottles that are included in the national deposit scheme for PET bottles, we use recycled PET as raw material. We have scaled up the use of specific logos in our consumer packaging that communicates the use of recycled content in packaging to the end-consumer in an easy and visible way.

We will continue to increase the post-consumer recycled content, that already now is up to 88%, in our single-use plastic shopping bags. We will also continue to substitute virgin plastic with recycled content in product packaging when possible. Majority of our PET drinking bottles are already now included in the national deposit system, with a recycling rate of 90%, and we will continue to increase the recycled content in these bottles. We continue to communicate about the importance of circular plastic economy, including the use of recycled content. We also aim to develop further our logos that we use for communication the recycled content to consumers directly in the product packaging, so that the use of recycled content is visible for the consumers. This way we hope to normalize and create value for the use recycled plastic in the society.

As during previous reporting years as well, our reported data covers solely the Private Label food and non-food products’ consumer packaging in the Grocery Retail Business of our operations, thus excluding all other business areas, such as restaurant and hotel business.

To assess recyclability, we used a local approach, for which:

• Compared to the recycling rate survey results, we consider the following packaging categories (representing 0% of our total packaging weight) as non-recyclable: None.

• Compared to the recycling rate survey results, we consider the following packaging categories (representing 0.46% of our total packaging weight) as recyclable: PET Thermoforms, PP other rigid, A4 mono-material PE flexibles in B2C context

• We believe the above packaging categories meet the 30% recycling rate threshold in their respective market based on the following evidence: We follow the publicly available definitions for recyclability of different plastic types defined by The Finnish Plastics Recycling Ltd. This is due to the fact, that we operate in a specific local market with its own plastic packaging recycling capacity. It can be assumed that all end-users of our private label products sort their plastic packaging waste in Finland. In the Finnish plastic recycling system, all plastic packaging waste currently ends up to the same recycling plant. A4 mono-material PE, PET thermoforms as well as PP rigids are defined as recyclable in the Finnish context – meaning that it can be sorted, processed and there is market for the recycled material – thus the material is recyclable.

For product line(s) with available reuse model(s): We have a large variety of different product lines as we are a retail business.