Emissions
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.
The environmental projects we support
We support 13 high-impact environmental projects across North America that help us neutralize our remaining, unavoidable emissions.
Science Based Targets
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
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.
Regenerative Agriculture
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.
Sustainability Report
Learn more about our sustainability performance in our 2021 Sustainability Report.
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