Maple Leaf Foods is the first major carbon neutral food company in the world and has set ambitious science-based targets to reduce our carbon emissions.
Carbon Neutrality
In 2021, Maple Leaf Foods celebrated two years as the first major carbon neutral food company in the world. We are carbon neutral by aggressively avoiding and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and investing in high-impact environmental projects to neutralize our remaining and currently unavoidable emissions. We have neutralized all our remaining Scope 1 & 2 emissions and a portion of our Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. The Scope 3 emissions in our offset program include supplier emissions arising from animal production and packaging equivalent with the product volumes of Maple Leaf brands that display our Carbon Zero logo.
What it means to be carbon neutral
We’re proud to be the world’s first major carbon neutral food company. Michael McCain, President and CEO, reflects on this day.
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The environmental projects we support
We support 13 high-impact environmental projects across North America that help us neutralize our remaining, unavoidable emissions.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science Based Targets
We were the first food company in Canada to set science-based targets that are aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and approved by the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi). In 2019, we pledged to reduce our absolute scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year and the intensity (per tonne of product produced) of our scope 3 GHG emissions by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year. Importantly, science-based targets require that we reduce our emissions even as we grow.
See a breakdown of our carbon emissions below:
Carbon Reduction Strategy
Through our utility auditing program and our carbon reduction roadmap we are identifying and prioritizing opportunities that will have the greatest impact on our Scope 1 & 2 emissions.
Our Scope 3 emissions account for 82% of our total emissions sources. We are working with our suppliers, customers and industry stakeholders to identify opportunities to reduce our supply chain impacts and we are participating in different programs to share knowledge and advance collaboration on supply chain issues.
We are exploring transformative technologies like anaerobic digestion and regenerative agriculture to reduce our biggest sources of Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions: animal manure, emissions from third-party contracted growers and feed and crop production.
Anaerobic digestion is a proven and established technology that has the potential to meaningfully reduce GHG emissions and solid waste arising from our animal raising activities and operations while at the same time producing renewable natural gas that could replace our current fossil natural gas consumption at our facilities or inject it back to the grid.
Should Maple Leaf Foods proceed with anaerobic digestion technology, it would enable Maple Leaf to have a circular economy by converting organic waste streams into useful renewable fuel and other commodities.
We are investing in the emerging field of regenerative agriculture to reduce environmental impacts in our supply chain while regenerating the land and capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it back in the soil. Regenerative agriculture is a set of farming practices that regenerates the land, increases biodiversity and improves the soil.
We have teamed up with a Canadian company and the world’s largest provider of crop inputs, Nutrien, to expand our regenerative agriculture project. The project incentivizes and educates farmers within a defined supply shed where we source feed grains to adopt regenerative agriculture practices. The project focuses on reducing emissions of nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogen fertilizer while increasing soil carbon sequestration by adopting practices that improve soil health.
In 2021, Maple Leaf’s owned and leased hog barns recycled 1,205,810,412 litres of manure.
Manure Management
Good manure management is essential for minimizing GHG emissions caused by microbial activities during manure decomposition. In 2021, Maple Leaf’s owned and leased hog barns recycled 1,205,810,412 litres of manure from storage lagoons by applying it to fields as fertilizer and 100% of it was applied with a site specific nutrient management plan developed by a certified agrologist.
