Focus on Sustainability: Because our future matters

Recent years have shown an ever increasing drive towards sustainability, also known as corporate social responsibility (CSR).

For us, sustainable development is one of the major subjects for the future. Hence, we do not only want to decrease any negative impacts our activities may have on nature, society and prosperity, we also want to achieve positive effects on these elements. This means we need to put maximum effort into sustainable development of our organization, our machines, our suppliers, our products etc. Success will not only depend on our own organization but every company in our supply chain.

Sustainable developments comes in many shapes and we have chosen to adopt the “Triple Bottom Line” theory, also known as 3 Ps (People-Planet-Profit), which we transformed into a practical and methodological model - the Five Focus Matrix, namely:

- Input: all that is purchased by VFP for manufacturing purposes, both goods and services.
- Local well being: the mental and physical well being of employees and the local community.
- Waste: efficient use of materials and the knowledge and skills of employees.
- Assets: buildings, machinery, grounds and other production resources.
- Energy & Water: all that is related to the use and consumption of energy and water.

In the last months we have worked on gathering and evaluating all information with reference to the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI GR3) guidelines.
The result is our first sustainability report: Focus on Sustainability, which we will communicate to all our stakeholders and to anyone interested.
Reporting about sustainability is part of checking our performances, targets and taking actions on relevant topics. This can only be an ongoing process.

One example of a sustainable initiative we would like to share with you is the CooKit project.
Part of our production waste has a sustainable destination (following the usual tight controls on how our  waste is disposed of). VFP donates waste aluminium paper to the Kozon Foundation. The Kozon Foundation is a Dutch organization run solely by volunteers with the objective of reducing the use of firewood for cooking in the dry tropics. The materials are shipped to Africa where groups of local people stick them to cardboard and transform them into The CooKit. The CooKit makes it possible to cook by using solar energy.
Dependent on the situation, The CooKits are distributed for free (in refugee camps) or sold. The units are subject to wear and tear and when they cannot be used any longer they are cut into strips and used as fuel. The aluminium is collected and used in new products by the local black smith.

These and other initiatives by Vaassen Flexible Packaging make us  your sustainable partner in the flexible packaging industry.