Highlighting its CO2-neutral production milestone, as well as palm oil transparency efforts
03 Jul 2019 | Palsgaard
Inventor of the modern plant-based emulsifier Palsgaard has cemented its position as an “early mover” on the carbon production front. The Danish company has achieved its aim of total carbon-neutral production two years prior to its 2020 goal, describing the achievement as a “milestone for the whole ingredients industry.” FoodIngredientsFirst was at Palsgaard’s headquarters in Juelsminde, Denmark, with CEO Jakob Thøisen last week to hear the news first-hand.
This is Lakshmi Hai here at the Parsgaard headquarters in Denmark.
This visit is to mark the company's 100 year anniversary as as to celebrate it achieving CO2 neutral production.
I'm here with Jacob Tawson, CEO, to speak about how the company's looking forward now it's reached its milestone.
So Jacob, can you share some of the key techniques you employed at your global plans to cut emissions?
To reach the goal, you mean, yes, I can.
First and foremost, we started back in 2005 by by constructing a straw fired burner here at Palsgaard, and that reduced our sea emission significantly, and that's really what sparked the idea.
How could we do, how could we make sure that we could reduce even further at that time, apart from reducing CO2, it was also a financially very good investment because we went from.
From diesel to straw, which reduced our CO2 emissions by 1900 tons.
So that really got us on track to where we are today.
After 2005, we were, we sat down and we were thinking how can we, how can we do more?
And the CEO of the Sko Foundation at the time, Mr.
Ber Briggs, he went to Greenland and he had been there three years prior to his second visit and he saw for himself how the ice and the the glaciers were melting, the glaciers, sorry.
And he came back and we started discussing how, what can our small contribution be to reduce CO2 emissions and to fight climate change.
And we discussed various opportunities and up until 2010 we set the goal in 2010 that we wanted to become CO2 neutral in 2020.
Now we are very proud that we reached this goal two years early.
What have we done apart from the straw fired burner?
We have installed LED lighting sensors that that.
That cuts the light when people are leaving the room.
We have installed heat exchanges.
We have insulated the factory to a large extent so that we don't have to use so much energy to our processes as we used to do in the past.
That has taken us a fair part of the way.
Then we changed at some point, we changed our heavy fuel to natural gas, and as a second step, we changed the natural gas to biogas.
So in 2015, The straw fired burner, the fact that we changed from heavy fuel to natural gas to biogas at the same time we also started back in 2011 to buy green windmill energy that has later on been shifted to hydro Scandinavian hydro energy.
Altogether it made us CO2 neutral in Denmark, which is by far the biggest plant we have, is by far where we produce the most.
And we were CO2 neutral at the late 2015.
And then in 2016, 2018, our Mexican plant.
And our Dutch plant came on stream, variety of means, how we arrived to CO2 neutrality, but in Mexico and in the Netherlands we installed solar panels to cover part, if not all of the electricity consumption, and we started buying biogas too.
Then we have now we ended up with our factory in Malaysia which is a very brand new factory, but unfortunately the infrastructure with regard to energy is not as we know it from Europe or elsewhere, so we looked for opportunities, how we could make it CO2 neutral, and we came across.
That we could not do it right away by our own means, so we had to buy an offset, which we have done through the United Nations.
They have a program where they have windmill parks in India, and we have bought certificates in 3 named windmill parks in India that Takes out the same amount of CO2 as we cannot reach by our own means, reducing in Malaysia at this moment in time.
At this moment in time, OK.
And one other thing you shared today was that you plan to double capacity in the next 4 years.
So how will you do that while remaining carbon neutral?
That's of course a very, very big challenge.
We already produce a lot of products today, and as you say, we have a plan to double capacity.
That will take a lot of electricity and biogas, but what we want to do, we, we're looking into making a large, large solar panel plant close to our factory in Juls Minde that will keep us CO2 neutral even with double up on production on the electricity side.
We will still be buying the biogas needed for our processes apart from the solar panel, electricity production.
OK, thank you for that.
Really exciting times here at Pascard, but I have a question in regard to your emulsifier portfolio and sus sustainability again.
But what changes have you implemented in the past two years to make, your emulsifiers be more sustainability, more, more attractive in that sense, for example, regarding palm oil or.
Over the last years we have started buying what is called segregated.
It's called SG.
It's it's it's a particular certification we get from an organization called RSPO and they make sure that the palm oil we buy is made to a certain very high degree of sustainability called segregated, and we buy actually physically the oil from Malaysia that we get to here.
We do not buy certificates.
We buy the actual physical oil which is segregated, and we know the route from Malaysia all the way to here, the whole supply chain we know of, and we get the certification validating this.
OK.
I'm assuming that costs you more as a company to do so.
That definitely costs us more for sure.
It costs us quite a lot more, but you know the amount of tons that we produce, the cost is relatively small per kilo, per kg, and as you know, when our products go to the manufacturers, they will use between 0.3 to 0.7.
Percent in their final recipe, so the cost is next to nothing in the final product.
Brilliant.
OK.
I have one more question for you again, regarding your portfolio.
My question is, so at a time when everyone is going clean label, how do you remain on the label?
How we remain under the label.
And you know, the world's population is growing by 87 million new inhabitants every year, so emulsifiers has a place and it has come to stay.
It's definitely necessary to use emulsifiers in order to reduce food waste and make sure that everybody in the future too can get the food they would like.
OK, brilliant.
Thank you very much, Jacob.
You're welcome.
