MUNICH, GERMANY - A partnership with IFCO leads to substantial environmental savings, which has become even more evident as the Reusable Packaging Container (RPC) provider announces another record year. IFCO has eclipsed an exciting milestone, reaching 2 billion reusable packaging shipments of fresh produce in 2022.

“Two billion trips at a global scale is a monumental accomplishment,” said Michael Pooley, Chief Executive Officer of IFCO. “The magnitude of the environmental savings created through our circular business model reflect IFCO’s ability to achieve our purpose of making the fresh grocery supply chain sustainable and our capacity to enable our customers to achieve their own sustainability goals.”

With the help of its customers, IFCO saved in total more than 614,000 tons of CO₂-e emissions along the fresh grocery supply chain, the equivalent of driving to the moon 8,900 times. As the company explained in a press release, IFCO calculates these science-based savings through independent Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). This allows growers, producers, and retail customers that optimize IFCO RPCs to quantify the environmental benefits of IFCO’s solutions and how they contribute to their own sustainability KPIs.

Compared to single-use packaging alternatives, IFCO RPCs played a key role in reducing carbon emissions, water and energy usage, solid and food waste generation, and timber consumption.

Customers who utilized these RPCs across the global fresh produce supply chain also saved:

• 11.8 million cubic meters of water—equivalent to 4,736 Olympic-sized pools
• 42,214 terajoules of electricity—enough to power over 5.2 million electric vehicles for a year
• 339,116 metric tons of solid waste—equivalent to 41,535 truckloads of waste
• 55,140 metric tons of food product waste—equivalent to over 88 million meals 

Further highlighting its positive impact on the environment, IFCO was recently recognized by Sustainalytics, an independent ESG Risk Rating Agency, as a 2023 ESG Top-Rated Company in Europe.

IFCO