Driving Toward Zero Waste to Landfill at Our Major Packing Sites

For decades, the journey of fresh produce from field to table has been measured in sunshine, soil and water. Today it is also measured in the waste that never leaves the packing shed. Across our global network, the shift toward zero waste to landfill at major packing sites is reshaping how fruit moves from the orchard to the consumer's kitchen, and Australia is right at the heart of that conversation.

With Australian households throwing out an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of food each year, and supermarkets racing to meet the Australian Packaging Covenant's stricter recovery targets, the pressure to close the loop has never been more visible. From the citrus groves of the Sunraysia to the banana plantations of far north Queensland, packing operations are quietly becoming laboratories for circular thinking, where peel, punnet and pallet all get a second life.

The Big Picture on Waste

When we talk about zero waste to landfill, we mean more than ticking a recycling box. It means designing every step of the packing process so that materials stay in circulation: cardboard gets baled and reused, plastic crates are washed and returned, organic matter becomes compost or animal feed, and anything that genuinely cannot be diverted becomes a last resort rather than the default.

Our major packing sites collectively process millions of tonnes of fruit and vegetables every year. Historically, a meaningful share of the skins, cores, trimmings and rejected produce ended up in tips, along with plastic film, strapping and damaged cardboard. The new direction treats those streams as resources, not rubbish, and that single shift in mindset ripples through procurement, logistics, facility design and daily shift routines.

How Our Packing Houses Measure Up

Tracking progress requires clear, consistent data. Each packing site now logs the volume and category of every waste stream, from organic by-products to non-recyclable film, and the figures are reviewed monthly. The Australian sites benchmark themselves against internal targets as well as national averages, recognising that local conditions, including council kerbside recycling schemes, regional composting capacity and proximity to processing partners, shape what is realistic in each catchment.

A typical shift at a packing house might involve sorting over a hundred bins, from waxed cartons to biodegradable fibre trays. When teams can see the cumulative weight they have diverted in a single week, the work feels less like housekeeping and more like a measurable contribution to the company's wider sustainability strategy. Several sites now report diversion rates above 90 percent, and the conversation has moved from "can we do it" to "how quickly can we push the rest."

Rethinking Packaging Materials

Packaging is often the first thing consumers notice, and it is also where many Australian retailers are pushing hardest. Woolworths and Coles have both committed to phasing out problematic plastics, and suppliers are being asked to align with the Australasian Recycling Label and forthcoming recycled-content mandates. Our response has been to redesign what touches the fruit in the first place.

Where possible, we have shifted to cardboard trays printed with water-based inks, eliminated polystyrene from our banana boxes, and introduced returnable plastic crates that can survive hundreds of trips between the orchard and the distribution centre. Suppliers are vetted not only on price and quality but on their capacity to take back and process used packaging, so the loop closes in practice rather than on paper.

Turning By-Products into New Value

The most visible win on the road to zero waste to landfill has come from organic by-products. Pineapple tops, banana stems, melon rinds and citrus peel, once destined for the skip, now feed a growing network of downstream users. Some become high-fibre stockfeed for cattle stations inland; others are sent to composting facilities serving local councils from Brisbane to Perth.

This kind of industrial symbiosis, where one company's waste is another's raw material, is still maturing in Australia, but the foundations are strong. Local biogas operators, stockfeed mills and even cosmetics manufacturers are hungry for consistent, traceable supply. By treating our by-products as a product line in their own right, we have turned a cost centre into a small but growing revenue stream, while keeping tonnes of material out of landfill every season.

Working with Australian Growers and Communities

The shift toward circular packing cannot happen in isolation. Many of our Australian growers are family operations, some running orchards their grandparents planted, and they bring a deep practical knowledge of the land. Walking through a packing shed with a grower who has spent fifty years reading weather and soil, you quickly learn that sustainability is not a slogan; it is something they have been doing in some form since before the word became fashionable.

We are also investing in local education, partnering with TAFE campuses and regional schools to show students what a modern, low-impact packing facility looks like. In the Goulburn Valley, community drop-off days invite neighbours to bring surplus fruit for processing rather than dumping it. These grassroots connections matter because Australian consumers, as anyone who has listened to a queue at a farmer's market will know, are quick to ask where their food comes from and how it is handled.

Training the People Behind the Progress

Infrastructure and contracts only go so far. The daily decisions of line supervisors, forklift drivers and sorters determine whether a cardboard bale gets contaminated with food residue and sent to landfill or stays clean enough to be recycled. Investing in people, particularly the next generation of leaders, is therefore just as important as investing in new kit.

Our leadership training for women program is helping build a pipeline of supervisors who understand both operational discipline and environmental targets. When a team leader knows why a certain plastic film cannot go into the paper bales, and can explain it calmly during a busy afternoon shift, the system works. Cultural change in a packing house is built one conversation at a time, usually in the ten minutes before smoko.

What's Next on the Road to Zero

Hitting 95 percent diversion is one thing; reaching true zero waste to landfill at every major packing site is another. The hardest five percent is always the most stubborn: contaminated plastics, mixed materials, and the residue that accumulates in places no one thinks to look until an audit shines a light. Our next phase focuses on those stubborn streams, with pilot projects exploring compostable films, on-site anaerobic digestion and closer partnerships with Australian recyclers who can handle tricky multilayer laminates.

We are also extending the approach beyond the packing shed itself. Office kitchens, maintenance workshops and staff amenities generate their own waste streams, and aligning them with the same diversion targets keeps the message simple: nothing leaves this site unless it has a next destination. Digital tracking, third-party verification and transparent reporting will give stakeholders, from retailers to local councils, confidence that the numbers are real.

The memory worth keeping is straightforward: a packing house that sends nothing to landfill is not a futuristic fantasy, it is an operating model being built right now in sheds from Mareeba to Mildura. Every pallet reused, every peel composted, every crate returned is a small vote for an Australian food system that takes its resources seriously. The work is far from finished, but the direction is clear, and the bins on the floor tell the story long before any annual report does.