KEY POINTS:
Dairy giant Fonterra has recorded a 20 per cent waste cut and recycled more than 5000 tonnes of cardboard, paper and plastic in the past year.
That equates to savings of more than 85,000 trees, or about 2700 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The reductions came from the company's New Zealand manufacturing sites and offices.
Through Fonterra's eco-efficiency programme, there has been an 84 per cent saving in waste sent to landfill over the past five years.
Eco-efficiency programme manager Spring Humphrey said a good chunk of the waste reduction had come from reprocessing dairy products into stockfood, and reusing many wooden pallets.
The company's staff had embraced the efficiency drive, he said, and were finding new ways to recycle, reuse and reduce traditional waste products.
All sites were linked by an "eco-efficiency champion", he said, who ran the programme on each site.
Through them, staff helped identify how waste could be eliminated, reduced or recycled in ways that benefited the business. The initiatives included a new milk sample container, which tagged milk samples using a reusable electronic chip instead of a plastic label - saving over 100 tonnes of plastic a year.
Cheese cartons had been replaced by vacuum sealed bags, allowing 7500 bags to be packed on a pallet instead of 5000 cartons.
