It starts with us
By collecting food scraps, we're helping power local homes and protect the environment.
Like any good business, we recognise that people are our biggest asset, but with just over 1000 employees in APL's parent company, Profile Group, those people also create a lot of waste. Previously, most of it went straight to landfill, so as part of the 'Designing out waste' and 'Regenerating nature' goals, we decided to partner with Ecogas to harness the power - quite literally - of organic waste.
Every business unit in the Profile Group family of businesses, including APL, now has a specially marked bin to collect food waste such as fruit and veggie scraps, tea bags and paper towels. These bins sit alongside recycling, cardboard, cans and general waste bins, which aim to make it as simple as possible for employees to play a role in meeting the company’s waste diversion targets.
From scraps to energy
All the food waste is then sent to the Ecogas Reporoa Organics Processing Facility, New Zealand’s first large-scale food waste-to-bioenergy facility. Through a natural process called Anaerobic Digestion, micro-organisms break down all of the organic waste. This process creates sustainable energy and biogas. It also produces digestate, a nutrient rich substance that is used as a biofertiliser.
At its peak, the Reporoa facility in the Central North Island will turn 75,000 tonnes of organic waste from businesses and kerbside food scrap collections throughout the North Island into energy that could power the equivalent of around 2,500 households in the region for a year, produce clean bio-fertiliser for approximately 2,000 hectares of local farmland, inject renewable gas back into our national gas grid and provide renewable CO2 and heat to help grow tomatoes in T&G Fresh’s local glasshouse. In 2023, Profile Group sent 8.2 tonnes of organic waste to Ecogas, including 2.3 tonnes from APL.
Our aim across all business units is to send 100% of organic waste to Ecogas, to be diverted from landfill.
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