Danone: Polluting paradise

Founded in 1919, the French company Danone includes brands Evian, Activia, Actimel, Volvic, Alpro, and more. In 2020, it sold products in 120 countries with global sales reaching 23.6 billion euros, making it one of the world’s top ten largest plastic packaging producers.

Danone claims to be committed to producing products that preserve the planet’s resources whilst also growing its business. This article will examine how committed Danone really is to reducing its plastic footprint.

A Sustainability Strategy

In 2023, Danone launched the Danone Impact Journey, a new sustainability strategy with three goals:

1. Achieving 100% fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2030.

2. 50% reduction in the use of virgin fossil-based packaging by 2040 (30% by 2023)

3. Recover as much plastic as they use to prevent plastic pollution by 2024.

Danone is a signatory of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF) New Plastics Economy Initiative, which aims to drive behavioural change in the plastic pollution crisis through reusable packaging schemes and improving plastic recovery and circularity.  This initiative promised to reduce plastic production by 2025; however, Danone missed its targets and faced no consequences.

Voluntary initiatives like this one allow corporations to pledge to reach certain environmental targets that are never intended to be met. These targets are used to distract consumers and governments from the extreme harm plastic production causes to the planet and people. By claiming it will clean up more plastic than it produces by 2030, Danone creates the illusion of accountability and environmental progression, while continuing to pollute.

Plastic Dumping Grounds

While Danone attempts to appear environmentally conscious in Western nations, its sustainability projects are not equally dispersed. Irresponsible manufacturing by corporations like Danone has led to rampant single-use packaging in the Global South. Danone also uses states in Asia and Africa as plastic dumping grounds, where it uses harmful and ineffective methods, such as chemical recycling, to dispose of plastic waste. The Danone-owned brand Aqua was identified as the biggest plastic polluter in Indonesia, leading Danone to commit to recovering more plastic than it uses in Indonesia by 2025. However, there is no evidence that this commitment has been fulfilled.

Plastic offsetting is a misguided attempt to reduce a corporation's plastic footprint by paying other companies to remove plastic from the environment. This is done primarily in the Global South, where plastic polluters employ waste pickers, fund recycling schemes, and build incineration sites to turn plastic into fuel. In Bali, Danone funded a partner company to open the Samtaku Jimbaran plastic offsetting facility in September 2021. This site was closed in April of 2024 after breaching housing regulations and impacting the local community’s health. The plastic-burning facility released toxic emissions that were dangerous to inhale and was built mere metres from homes without consulting residents, leaving locals unable to open their windows and hospitalising many. The facility, marketed as a safe and sustainable recycling centre, did not burn plastic in cement kilns to control the release of environmentally harmful emissions. Instead, it burned plastic to heat boilers, despite the risks open-air plastic burning poses to public health and the environment.

According to EMF figures, Danone’s use of virgin plastic in fossil-based packaging has only been reduced by 13% globally from 2019 to 2023. To reach their goal of reducing virgin fossil-based packaging use by 50% by 2040, Danone could:

• switch to reusable packaging materials that are less harmful to the planet.

• set up more deposit systems, where consumers return their single-use plastics to the corporation for it to dispose of them responsibly, relieving consumers of undeserved blame for the climate crisis.

  
  

To work towards sustainability, Danone must be transparent about its plastic footprint and make consistent changes, including in the Global South.

This is Part One. Read more about Danone’s greenwashing tactics in Part Two: "Danone Taken to Court"...

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For more information contact: info@scarabtrust.org.uk

Image: Landfill, Waste disposal, Garbage - Image by Mumtahina Rahman from Pixabay (ST ref: 1334)

Edited by Sophia Stilwell

Additional edit 12 June 26