Sustainability report
Sustainability highlights 2024
We are supporting businesses and organisations of all shapes and sizes, as well as Local Authorities (and their residents) in navigating this critical period of policy change. In many cases we are helping them to identify and seize the new opportunities that some of these policies present to prevent, reduce, reuse and recycle waste.
Sustainability strategy
Our strategy is based on three strategic pillars:
Strategic Pillars
Strategic Ambitions
Targets to 2030
Alignment to UN SDGs
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Strategic Pillars
Enabling a circular economy
Strategic Ambitions
Unlock £1.25bn of investment in green economy by 2030
Targets to 2030
- Leading in surplus redistribution
- Quadrupling our plastics recycling
- Investing in low carbon energy from waste
Alignment to UN SDGs
Hover to scale
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Strategic Pillars
Tackling climate change
Strategic Ambitions
Having reduced emissions by 70% since 2002, we will deliver a further 50% reduction by 2030
Targets to 2030
- 50% reduction in carbon emissions
- Cease buying fossil-fuelled trucks
- Increase collection route efficiency by 20%
Alignment to UN SDGs
Hover to scale
These are significant changes, and this information will allow us to plan how we put the policies into practice.
In 2024 we have strengthened and broadened our capabilities and capacity through a series of strategic acquisitions. By offering our customers end-to-end sustainable waste management and closed-loop solutions, we help them move waste up the hierarchy towards a circular economy.
Reducing the amount of waste created in the first place is vitally important – and often overlooked. We actively work with our customers to help them understand how they can reduce their waste and, where appropriate, redistribute or reuse surplus, helping them to meet their own sustainability goals.
Over the last year, we have stopped over 45,000 tonnes of food and drinks from going to waste – that’s around a 10% increase on the year before!
Biffa Polymers is at the forefront of plastic recycling in the UK, operating multiple state-of-the-art reprocessing facilities. We have increased our plastic recycling capacity from 63,000 tonnes to 213,000 tonnes since 2019. This means we have met our goal of tripling our plastics by 2025 and are on track to meet our target of quadrupling it by 2030.
Around 95% of the waste plastics Biffa trades from our sorting and transfer facilities is sent to companies within the UK, with the remainder kept within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Case studies
M&S - affordable school uniforms
Wolseley - gold standard packaging
Thanks to a wide range of measures in financial year 2024, we have achieved a 37% reduction of Scope 1 and 2 emissions against our 2019 baseline.
Our emissions target progress has has been achieved through the continued improvement of our landfill gas capture, and efficiency gains within our operations.
We have removed 68 diesel Refuse Collection Vehicles (RCVs) to date as a result of our acquisitions. And, since the launch of our sustainability strategy, we have improved route efficiency saving over 2,900 tCO2e per year.
We now have 158 alternative fuelled vehicles in our waste collections fleet, including our first electric skip loader which operates on the Isle of Wight.
We recognise that the processes required to turn waste into valued resources and help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels can be energy intensive. To minimise the impact of these essential processes, our Biffa electricity tariff acquires energy from 100% renewable sources. We are also continually looking to make our operations as efficient as possible and reduce the intensity of our electricity usage.
Case study
Working towards a Greene future
As a business with national scale, we operate in many communities across the UK. We take our responsibility to those communities seriously and ensure our activities deliver local social value.
Community Shop, an award-winning, not-for-profit social enterprise is generating positive, lasting change in 12 of the UK’s most deprived communities. By providing thousands of people with access to high-quality, low-cost food, and life-changing personal development support, Community Shop is building stronger individuals and more confident communities.
During the year, Community Shop have delivered over 174,000 personal development programmes, with over 2,000 new skills and qualifications achieved. This has helped over 2,500 people return to work.
During 2023 we took a colleague-centric approach to our wellbeing communications, hearing from our colleagues about their experiences as well as focusing on topics people told us were important to them. Key communications and campaigns have included male health, sleep, mental health, and keeping active.
We are also committed to ensuring our employees are valued. Our industry-leading family-friendly policies are designed to help provide support and flexibility, allowing colleagues to do their job while balancing family life.
On International Women’s Day 2023, we communicated our aspiration that 50% of all new hires and promotions into leadership and management positions would be women. As of 31st March 2024, we had achieved 42%, a 1% increase on last year.
We are proudly collaborating with WasteAid, a charity dedicated to transforming waste management globally. Now in our fifth year of partnership, we are making significant strides in supporting waste management projects worldwide.
To develop and deepen the relationship, three Biffa colleagues recently visited The Gambia to witness WasteAid’s impactful work first-hand.
We operate in a high-risk industry and are focused on keeping our people and the public safe. Effective leadership and risk management plays an essential role in this, with training and initiatives to empower our people to stay safer together in the workplace and on the road.
In the past year, we have reduced our Lost Time Injury (LTI) rate to 0.29 from 0.32 in the previous year. This gets us one step closer to our 2030 target: to have reduced our LTI rate by 50% from our 2019 baseline.
Creating a buzz in the community
Championing women at Biffa
