Dairy products producer cuts carbon footprint

Boucherville, Que. – Danone Canada has unveiled two ways in which the company is going green.

The manufacturer and distributor of yogurt and other dairy products has installed a new ecological manufacturing process for its individual serving products.

And the company is now using an ecological high-density polyethylene for its drinkable yogurt packaging.

The innovations are all part of the company’s corporate objective of reducing its carbon footprint by 30 per cent by 2012.

The ecological manufacturing process is called “expansion” and it’s a process that involves adding an inert agent in the polystyrene plastic. This agent forms a thin layer of foam in the polystyrene, which reduces the overall density of the plastic from approximately 18 per cent.

What that means is the weight of the individual serving packages are reduced by the same percentage.

The new packaging is made from sugar cane instead of hydrocarbon. With this bioplastic, Danone will reduce its CO2 footprint of drinkable yogurt containers by 55 per cent. The bioplastic is also 100 per cent recyclable.