Initiatives in factories
UCC’s main factory for home-use coffee for brewing, the Rokko Island Factory, was the first brewing coffee factory in Japan to obtain certification in ISO 14001, the international standard for environmental management systems. This is just one example of the ways in which we are striving to produce products that offer safety and reliability in addition to being eco-friendly.
In UCC’s beverages factories, meanwhile, we introduced biomass boilers and on-site blow molding equipment to enable plastic bottles to be molded within the factories themselves. Biomass boilers reuse the coffee grounds discharged following the extraction process as fuel, harnessing the energy thus generated to produce steam. By making efficient use of this steam as a source of heat within the factories, we can reduce our CO2 emissions by approximately 82% compared with conventional sources of fuel.
“On-site blow molding” entails taking delivery of plastic bottles in the form of small “test tubes,” and undertaking the whole process from molding to filling and packaging on-site. These tubes can be transported more efficiently than conventional pre-molded plastic bottles, enabling the reduction of CO2 emissions associated with transportation. To reduce our environmental footprint further, we also work to cut down on the volume of materials used by making our plastic bottles lighter and using thinner shrink film for labels in order to cut down on the volume of materials used.