Carbon Neutral Company

AIM Environmental Waste Diversion Project

Location: Ontario, Canada
Technology type: Composting
Certification: CSA Group

We support the Hamilton Central Composting Facility in Ontario, Canada. Here, source-separated organics from three municipal collection sites are turned into compost.

View the CSA Group Registry

Brady Wind I

Location: North Dakota, USA
Technology type: Wind
Certification: Green-e

This is a 150 MW wind farm sponsored by Next Era Energy, the largest renewable energy developer in North America.

Carbon Neutral Technology Project

Location: Ontario, Canada
Technology type: Waste management
Certification: CSA Group

Used electronic devices are typically thrown into a landfill, adding to the net emissions of the products. This project’s program refurbishes end-of-first-life IT assets, which reduces emissions associated with the manufacturing of new IT equipment.

View the CSA Group Registry

Foam Blowing Agent Project

Location: Virginia, USA
Technology type: HFC Replacement
Certification: American Carbon Registry

This foam blowing agent project is in Winchester, Virginia. Its focus is on transitioning to a blowing agent with a lower Global Warmer Potential that’s used during manufacturing processes, which results in greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

View the American Carbon Registry

HFC Emissions Reduction

Location: Ontario, Canada
Technology type: HFC Replacement
Certification: American Carbon Registry

All polyurethane foam requires the use of blowing agents (BA) in its manufacture and application. This project uses a foam blowing agent that has a 99% lower Global Warming Potential than previous agents, so the switch to a more environmentally-sound agent reduces emissions for the product.

View the American Carbon Registry

Indigo Ag – Regenerative Agriculture

Location: USA

Indigo Ag helps farmers sustainably feed the planet. Companies can purchase verified agricultural carbon credits that reward individual farmers for adopting regenerative agriculture practices. Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm.

Maple Hill Landfill Gas

Location: Missouri, USA
Technology type: Landfill Gas
Certification: Climate Action Reserve

The landfill gas is collected through various processes of this project. It’s destructed in the end at an open flame, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

View the Climate Action Reserve Registry

Massachusetts Tri-City Forestry

Location: Massachusetts, USA
Technology type: Forestry
Certification: American Carbon Registry

Three cities in Massachusetts, Holyoke, Westfield, and West Springfield, launched a joint Improved Forest Management project on 17,000 acres of public forestland in central Massachusetts. This project is approximately 50 miles from Lightlife Foods in Turner Falls. This project enables the three cities to generate revenue from forests without resorting to more aggressive timber harvesting.

View our certificate of allocation

View the American Carbon Registry

Rochelle Municipal Landfill Gas

Location: Illinois, USA
Technology type: Landfill Gas
Certification: Climate Action Reserve

This project voluntarily captures and destroys methane from the landfill through a combination of gas wells, conveyance piping, and condensate removal equipment. The combined process destroys gas at either an open flare or an energy generation facility.

View the Climate Action Reserve Registry

St. Joseph Wind Energy

Location: Manitoba, Canada
Technology type: Wind
Certification: Green-e

This project is a 138 MW wind farm. It’s the largest wind project in Manitoba and has been operational since 2010.

St. Leon Wind Energy

Location: Manitoba, Canada
Technology type: Wind
Certification: Green-e

This project is a 120.5 MW wind farm. It’s one of the largest in Manitoba and is located approximately 150 km southwest of Winnipeg near the town of St. Leon and Swan Lake First Nation.

University Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Project

Location: Indiana, USA
Technology type: Energy Efficiency & Renewables
Certification: Verified Carbon Standard

Ball State University in Indiana has pioneered the use of Verified Carbon Standard’s methodology designed for higher education institutions. The projects spurred innovation, uptake of energy efficiency, and renewable energy through the communities surrounding the university. The campus reinvests revenue from carbon credit sales into further emissions reduction projects on campus.

View the verified carbon standard registry

Van Steyn Dairy Digester

Location: California, USA
Technology type: Livestock
Certification: Climate Action Reserve

This project is located on a California dairy farm that uses a flush system to collect manure from 650 cows. The manure is transported to an anaerobic digester and the gas is converted to electricity, reducing emissions.

View the Climate Action Reserve Registry

2013

Maple Leaf Foods appoints Lynda Kuhn, a member of our Senior Leadership Team, to create a company-wide sustainability program.

2014

Maple Leaf Foods embraces the message “you manage what you measure” and sets big, bold goals for the company in key sustainability areas including nutrition, animal care, our people and communities. We set the boldest intensity-based environmental goal in our industry: 50% environmental footprint reduction by 2025.

2015

Maple Leaf Foods brings on board Tim Faveri, VP of Sustainability & Shared Value, to oversee our efforts to become a more efficient and environmentally friendly operator. We also retain an independent engineering firm to audit all our operations to identify improvements in energy, water, and solid waste and create an action plan for each facility to reduce its footprint.

2016

Maple Leaf Foods focuses on a multi-phase national program to convert all lighting at facilities to energy efficient LEDs. We also launch heat-recovery projects to capture excess heat generated by compressors, boilers and other equipment and use it to pre-heat water and send to other parts of facilities where more heat is needed. We begin to explore other opportunities like geothermal heating and cooling, solar energy, battery storage, and hybrid and electrical vehicle use.

2017

Maple Leaf Foods completes phase 1 of our national lighting retrofit program and launches phase 2. We continue to focus on our utility usage by implementing a robust utility management system to monitor utility consumption and measure our environmental performance at each facility. This system houses all data which is analyzed to target further reduction strategies.

2018

Maple Leaf Foods completes phase 2 of our national lighting retrofit program and begins to expand the efforts to barns and distribution facilities. We also continue our partnership with a local biodigestion company that accepts organic waste and turns it into renewable energy. We begin the development of a comprehensive carbon management strategy.

2019

Maple Leaf Foods commences re-audits of our largest facilities to assess the impact of the projects we implemented since 2015 and identify additional opportunities to further reduce our environmental footprint. We begin developing a formal feasibility review of anaerobic biodigestion technology to capture methane at our facilities and from pig manure at our barns.

7 November 2019: Maple Leaf Foods is the first major food company in the world to be carbon neutral! We are able to achieve carbon neutrality by aggressively reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, committing to science-based targets for even further reductions and investing in environmental projects that offset remaining GHG emissions, bringing our net footprint to zero today.

2020

2020 is a milestone year for Maple Leaf Foods. We achieve our interim reduction target of 20% by 2020 for most of our environmental footprint measures. We celebrate one year as the world’s first major carbon neutral company. We become a founding member of the Canadian Plastics Pact (CPP) to work collectively with other companies, NGOs and public sector partners to tackle plastic waste and pollution. And together with CN and Celestica, we sign an open letter to call on Canadian companies to take meaningful climate action, protect the environment and help to ensure a sustainable, equitable and healthy future for all Canadians.

2021

This is another exciting year for Maple Leaf Foods. We convert all sow housing to our unique Advanced Open Sow Housing system. We partner with WWF-Canada to protect carbon-dense areas across Canada and to reduce the effects of climate change. Maple Leaf Foods has teamed up with Nutrien to encourage and educate farmers on the benefits of adopting regenerative agriculture practices. By investing in this project with farmers within our supply chain, we will directly reduce our Scope 3 emissions and progress towards achieving our Scope 3 science-based target.