Stora Enso has been awarded Best Circular Solution, one of three sustainability awards presented by Tetra Pak to its suppliers on 3 December. The award recognizes the circularity performance of Stora Enso and its significant achievements in beverage carton recycling innovation. Earlier this year, Stora Enso and Tetra Pak announced their collaboration in a packaging circularity initiative that will triple the used beverage carton (UBC) recycling capacity in Poland, including its entire UBC volume and overflow from the country neighboring countries.

Tetra Pak launched its “Join Us in Protecting the Planet” supplier sustainability initiative in 2020 to catalyze its suppliers’ climate, biodiversity and circularity progress and promote the need for collaborative actions toward realizing the company’s 2030 goal – net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in its operations. Against this backdrop, Stora Enso was recognized for its commitments to circularity and awarded the 2021 Supplier Award for Circularity during a virtual ceremony on 3 December. The collaboration with Tetra Pak at Stora Enso’s Ostrołęka production unit in Poland delivered a complete concept for recycling all beverage carton components, including the wood fibers and barrier layers. Projects such as these are key to meeting sustainability targets and driving recycling at scale.

“We are honored to receive this award as it is an important recognition by Tetra Pak, a key contributor to packaging circularity in Europe and around the globe. We continue to be inspired to work in close partnership with Tetra Pak as we share a similar set of deeply-rooted sustainability values. We look forward to bringing our investment in Ostrołęka into action and continuing to learn from our shared efforts,” says Markku Luoto, VP, Head of Aseptic LPB & CKB.

Further, Stora Enso recently announced commitments to new targets for its key sustainability priorities in climate change, biodiversity, and circularity. This includes an updated science-based target to reduce Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 from a 2019 baseline, and is well-aligned with Tetra Pak who has also set emissions reduction targets for 2030 in line with 1.5°C according to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) across scopes 1, 2 and 3, with the ambition for net-zero emissions across the value chain by 2050.

“I am confident that the large-scale industrial project recently announced by Tetra Pak and Stora Enso will be successful, thanks to the common purpose that drives our shared project team. Together, we aim to increase the recycling rate of beverage cartons in Poland drastically. We hope that our joint investment will trigger Poland’s decision to make the collection for recycling of beverage cartons a legal mandatory requirement, ” concludes Christine Levêque, VP Collection and Recycling, Tetra Pak.