Work Smarter

Working smarter is about operational excellence in energy management, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sending zero waste to landfill.

Customers and society are demanding energy efficiency wherever possible, and in a year where our demands have been stable, we have used less energy to make our products. This has been particularly crucial in light of recent security of supply issues and attendant high costs.

Highlights in 2022

11%

Overall energy use has fallen 11% since 2019

43%

43% reduction in operational emissions since 2019

4

Four factories now using onsite solar systems

24

24 of our sites now send zero waste to landfill

Target I: Improve energy efficiency

By 2025, we will increase energy efficiency by 17% against a 2019 baseline.

Highlights in 2022

Significant shift in demand and supply challenged required agility in our operations to manage unprecedented complexity. This meant that our energy intensity decreased, however, our teams also came up with a lot of innovations to mitigate the impact.

Future Outlook

We have a very strong foundation and a talented team to manage our energy efficiency, and we will continue to drive this work further.

Target II: Reduce carbon emissions

By 2025, we will reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50%, and by 2029, Scope 3 emissions by 20% per tonne of raw materials, against a 2019 baseline.

Highlights in 2022

We have made significant progress in reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions and we have engaged our top 50 suppliers on reducing Scope 3 emissions.

Future Outlook

We will continue to invest in renewable energy sources to further reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions and will engage our suppliers to further reduce our Scope 3 emissions.

Target III: Stop sending waste to landfill

By 2022, we will send zero waste to landfill or incineration without energy recovery.^**

Highlights in 2022

While we did not achieve our target, we’ve made significant strides and plan to achieve this target in Q3 2022.

Future Outlook

Once we achieve zero waste to landfill across all of our sites, our focus will move to ensuring we maintain this level of excellence, as well as continuing to reduce the total amount of waste produced in our operations.

^{** Where legislation allows.}

Work Smarter in action

Beating the energy crisis

In response to the volatility of energy prices in 2022, we identified ‘16 quick wins’ for sites to implement, in addition to the existing 150 best practices outlined by the Energy Taskforce.

Each plant is audited on these measures, completion of which is tracked and reported to the kp leadership team. Examples include compressed air leakage detection, machine insulation and optimising machine run times, as well as shutting down heating, materials transport, air compressors and secondary motors, where possible.

In addition to these new ‘quick wins’, we also reviewed our exposure to energy market volatility risk, particularly in Europe. Overall, our risk exposure is ‘medium to low’. Where we rely on natural gas on some production lines, for example, we have switched to alternative fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas and diesel.

Beating the energy crisis

Decarbonising our value chain

Supplier engagement is key to decarbonising our value chain, because approximately 90% of our total carbon emissions come from things we buy, and not what we do in our direct operations. Engaging with suppliers is critical to achieving our science-based target.

During 2022, we refreshed our supplier engagement programme by engaging with our top 50 suppliers, which were selected based on their overall Scope 3 contribution.

Better planning minimises waste

Material management arrangements and techniques only work with specialist teams. In 2022, some 200 kp people around the world were trained on process efficiencies involving waste, following ‘Product Wheel’ methodology principles and practices.

The methodology minimises the number of ‘changeovers’ (from one product type to another) during production, and so reduces the waste created on a production line. All sites apply the Product Wheel methodology. In 2022, our Bukowice site recorded a decrease in tool changeovers from 155 to around 105 per month, with each changeover avoided saving start-up material in the thermoforming and extrusion processes, and ultimately increasing net production.