Pets and the planet - How Mars Petcare is taking steps to tackle waste

Each year, the world produces a staggering 2.01 billion tonnes of waste. Reducing this waste, and correctly disposing of it has become a critical global issue.

The healthcare industry, including veterinary care, produces a significant amount of waste due to single-use and other medical supplies, and tackling this plays an important part in reducing waste and driving responsible disposal efforts. Pet foods and other products can contribute to waste through plastic packaging, and measures to address this are also underway.

Mars’ worldwide commitments

With waste disposal having such a direct impact on our environment, we are dedicated to reducing the amount of waste we produce across our Mars Veterinary Health clinics and labs worldwide, and in the packaging of our pet food brands, while continuing to maintain high standards of nutrition and veterinary care. As one of the largest providers of pet healthcare in the world, we also feel a responsibility to share best practices and tools to inspire sustainable change across the veterinary profession.

In alignment with Mars, Incorporated’s Sustainable in a Generation Plan, which focuses on addressing the significant environmental and social challenges our planet and societies continue to face, we are committed to improving the circularity of our products and services, reducing waste, and increasing recycling. As part of our global sustainable packaging ambitions, we’re taking action to redesign our packaging portfolio as we work toward our goal of 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025. We’re making progress on reducing plastic use, including the elimination of 180 tonnes of plastic from multipacks of our pet food cans last year.

Alongside this, we are working to support the development of flexible plastic recycling infrastructure in the UK and make it easier and more convenient for our consumers to recycle their plastic packaging. Initiatives such as the UK Flexible Plastics Fund and Pets at Home in-store recycling points for flexible plastic help to provide solutions for materials that are tricky to recycle and typically end up as waste.

As we aim to better understand how we can have the biggest sustainability impact, we strive to create a positive vision for the future of the veterinary industry. Given the harmful effect plastics can have on our environment and on our and our pet’s health, reducing waste is and will remain a top priority for all our Mars Petcare divisions, including Mars Veterinary Health’s UK-based Linnaeus Group.

Action in the UK

Linnaeus is prioritizing waste management across its primary care and referral centres, ranging from basic behavioural changes to wider best practices. Across Linnaeus, we’ve been working to improve onsite recycling in particular, alongside waste segregation by sharing best practices via our Investors in the Environment scheme. This has been a challenge in recent years as the waste sector has adapted to changes in demand from sectors whose operations were affected by COVID. Currently, over 75% of our sites have recycling collections, and over 30% also have food waste collections. In the first 3 months of 2022, less than 1% of the domestic waste was sent to landfill, based on data from the 80% of sites with our preferred suppliers. These measures reduce the emissions from waste disposal and increase the volume that can be recycled and entered into the circular economy.

At Linnaeus, we have also encouraged waste reduction by including it as a target for our Investors in the Environment teams. We have shared best practices using the 2020 In Practice article co-authored by our Environmental Sustainability Lead as a basis for understanding waste segregation and the waste hierarchy. Measures used across our practices including use of reusable medical textiles such as surgical hats and gowns to replace single-use plastic-based hats, auditing bins to identify unnecessary waste and replacing plastic pharmaceutical bins with UN-approved cardboard bins. Our Green Products list, advertised by our intranet pages, suggests sustainable alternatives from our preferred suppliers such as water distillers to replace plastic bottled water. Reusable sharps and pharmaceutical bins are in use in two of our practices, which provides a scalable model for other clinics.

Action in the USA

In addition to waste-reduction efforts at Linnaeus, we are working to eliminate unnecessary waste across our U.S.-based Mars Veterinary Health hospitals. VCA has installed water filtration devices in some of its clinics to cut down on waste from single-use bottled water. Moving beyond plastic, Banfield Pet Hospital launched a “GoGreener” initiative across its 1,000+ U.S. hospitals, which provides clients the opportunity to receive electronic invoices and checkout paperwork instead of printed receipts, resulting in a 34% reduction in paper use and saving nearly 50 million sheets of paper a year. BluePearl is increasingly recycling and reusing electronics and electronic waste to prevent sending these items to landfills.

Further, Europe-based AniCura introduced chemical-free cleaning in 2018, using Duotex microfiber material and water, helping to decrease the use of detergents and disinfectants, and in some areas of its clinics, replaced single-use paper with reusable microfiber cloths. AniCura plans to expand its microfiber cleaning approach to additional clinics.

Looking ahead

While we’ve made notable environmental sustainability improvements across our veterinary clinics in recent years, we recognize this is only the beginning and look forward to sharing additional learnings, tips, and simple actions which any veterinary practice can take to reduce waste in the years to come.