Deforestation
The destruction of tropical rainforests and associated peatlands contributes around 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, adds to biodiversity loss and is contributing to social and land conflicts. We’re committed to ensuring that the raw and packaging materials we source are not associated with any damage to existing rainforests.
Below, we report on three categories of raw material that are central to our No Deforestation commitment: palm oil, paper and board, and soya. Our approach to the challenge is the same for all three: to work with suppliers and partners to map our supply chains back to the origin, then assess and develop our suppliers against our Responsible Sourcing Guideline (pdf, 1.6Mb).
At a glance
- 100% of our palm oil was RSPO-certified in 2013;
- We are on track to obtain 30% of our palm oil as responsibly sourced;
- We are mapping our soya supply chains in Brazil and Argentina to assess them against our Responsible Sourcing Guideline and develop action plans to support our key suppliers; and
- We are defining similar action plans for our paper supply chains and improving the environmental performance of the mills that supply us.
What we’re doing
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In our Commitment on Deforestation, we pledge that our products will not be associated with deforestation. This covers all the raw materials we use to make our products, as well as our packaging.
And in our Commitment on Biofuels, we raise awareness of the risks to forests, water and food supplies resulting from conversion to growing biofuel crops.
Other key actions taken over the past few years include:
- Developed Nestlé Responsible Sourcing Guideline (pdf, 1.6Mb) in partnership with NGOs, for use in responsible sourcing;
- Pledged our support to the goal of the Consumer Goods Forum, a global platform for the consumer goods industry, to work collaboratively to achieve zero net deforestation globally by 2020;
- Embarked on mapping our extended supply chains back to their origin; and
- Helped to develop publicly available Deforestation Guides for Commodity Sourcing, in partnership with Conservation International, to provide greater information about where deforestation may be occurring. This allowed us to refine the focus of our work and provided information to drive necessary alignment among businesses, governments and civil society.
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The traditional soya supply chain is extremely complex, and traceability to the grower is often not possible. Yet soya is key to our Commitment on Deforestation so we’ve been working on the challenge for a while now.
Having developed and finalised our category-specific requirements for soya, working with Conservation International, we then began to implement them, starting with a project to map our soya supply chains in Brazil and Argentina, with the help of Proforest.
The information we gathered highlighted critical risk control points, enabling us, in 2013, to assess our soya producers’ supply chains in the two countries against our Responsible Sourcing Guideline, and develop and launch action plans to support our key suppliers in meeting our requirements.
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As well as focusing on deforestation issues, our specific requirements for paper and board also address the environmental performance of paper mills.
In 2010, Nestlé made a no-deforestation commitment and in 2011, through a partnership with The Forest Trust (TFT), we started mapping and assessing the supply chains of more than 260 paper and board suppliers across Europe and priority countries (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the USA).
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- In 2011, Nestlé Europe completed mapping the supply chains of 180 paper and board suppliers, and assessed them with The Forest Trust (TFT) for priority verification. For environmental management, a scorecard model was applied and time-bound action plans agreed with paper and board suppliers.
- The paper and board suppliers engaged in the exercise covered 100% of the total paper-based packaging used in Nestlé factories in Europe.
- In 2013, Nestlé Europe updated the mapping of supply chains by adding all packaging papers used by co-packers and co-manufacturers – a significant step towards eliminating unwanted fibre sources from our supply chains.
We also continued this work in all other priority countries during 2013.
Next steps
- We will continue our work on the same commodities to address deforestation;
- In 2014, we will aim to obtain 30% traceable and 20% responsibly sourced for all key categories; and
- We will continue to map our supply chains and perform assessments on the ground to verify compliance with our Responsible Sourcing Guideline.
Related content
Find out more in our Creating Shared Value full report