Transforming IFF: Going from 14% staff engagement to a zero waste culture.

BACKGROUND

For more than 130 years IFF been focused on finding the most innovative solutions to help bring “better for you” products to market.
As a global leader in food, beverage, health, biosciences and sensorial experiences, they do a lot and continually innovate to do it better.

CHALLENGE

As IFF’s European headquarters embraced ESG standards, the UAE branch encountered a significant hurdle. There was a lack of insight into their current waste management.

Zero visibility into waste generation and disposal.
ESG reporting stuck - with clear direction to start.
Waste education initiatives lacked essential data to support them
No alignment between locations causing delays.

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SHORTCOMING IN PREVIOUS STRATEGIES

Mismanagement of Waste Streams. Mixing general waste with valuable materials like glass and cardboard led to landfill-bound waste.
Poor Data Accuracy. Data collected was haphazard, resulting in unreliable reporting.
Lack of Communication: Inconsistent feedback between locations created disparities in waste insights and
management.
One Size Fits All: Vendors offered standard solutions without considering IFF’s specific variables like employee count, education levels and activities conducted.

IDENTIFYING THEIR PAIN POINTS: ROADBLOCKS TO SUSTAINABILITY

Insufficient data for ESG progress tracking.
Scepticism regarding companies’ environmental claims/desire to overcome greenwashing claims in the market.
Transparency gap in product process and lifecycle.

1. ANALYSIS

Multiple Site visits – We go in and identify waste hotspots and flow.
Waste Analysis – We went in and looked at what waste they were generating.
Staff Questionnaire – Used to gauge the general staff initial engagement and knowledge.

2. SET-UP

Staff Onboarding – We used information gained from the questionnaire to tailor the staff onboarding session to their requirements.
Collection setup – Based on the waste analysis, we provided 6 different collection categories.

3. COLLECTING

In-depth Analysis – We track and sort every bag, mean that we were able identify issues and mistakes in their sorting.
Immediate Feedback – As their recycling was sorted we fed back their mistakes and solutions to fix them.

THE PROCESS

THE UPDATES

THE RESULT

Material Recycled

1,066.99 kg

CO2 Emissions avoided

657.85 kg

Energy Saved

21,767 kwh

IN 2023

REASONS FOR NOT RECYCLING

The initial employee questionnaire, which we use to gauge knowledge and potential engagement, was filled out by only 14% of the staff, indicating to us that there was not a sense of urgency to address their waste issue by the majority of the staff.

The onboarding session addressed this.

MATERIAL CLEANLINESS

June 2023: 73.06%

December 2023: 87.3%

MIXED MATERIAL

62.5% Segregated

Update 1

75% Segregated

Update 2

87.5% Segregated

Changes to bin instructions
We experienced a large amount of material mixing and contamination of the material put in all bins.
The instructions on the bins were made simpler through the use of graphics.

UPDATE 1

Colour coding
Mixing & contamination was lower but still high.
A study was conducted to identify the colour the staff associated with the different material and the bins were updated to match this.
This was to provide an instant visual aid to each bin.

UPDATE 2

Location tracking
With the amount of mixing and contamination down to less than 13% we saw the same issue reoccurring, which indicated that the contamination was coming from a single location within the office.
We tracked each bin location and identified that the issues were arising from an individual lab, meaning we could further educate the staff who had access to that area.