Reducing our volume of waste

This is another of Sodexo’s key strategies to reduce our impact on the environment and achieve our ambitious targets. Throughout our supply chain, we have taken numerous steps to improve our waste management, leading to a significant reduction in the volume of waste.  

Since 2006, Sodexo has been committed to collecting and sorting its waste. Today, 100% of the waste produced by our activities is sorted and 96% of organic waste is recycled. 

As well as recycling and recovery, we are also committed to reducing all of our waste. One of the ways in which this is achieved is through the WasteWatch programme, which aims to limit food waste and reduce the volume of organic waste. 

As for inorganic waste, our actions are also bearing fruit: 

• We are working with our suppliers to reduce plastic packaging as part of our “zero single-use plastic” strategy.  
• We are committed to a cradle-to-cradle approach in our cleaning services. Based on the principle of zero pollution, we reuse 100% of the professional cleaning agents used by our maintenance teams. 
• We also protect our water resources, notably by using tools to assess and improve water management at our sites. 
• All our employees are trained in the “ecoreflexes”. These simple instructions on water, energy and waste management, displayed at all Sodexo sites, help us to stay on track on a daily basis. 

As a catering company, fighting food waste is a priority and a responsibility! It needs to be done both as an environmental process to reduce our carbon footprint and, above all, as an ethical process. 

Action at every level 

Our commitment begins internally, with clear and ambitious measures. At Sodexo, we are working to reduce food waste and unavoidable waste at every stage of our activities, from ordering to service, storage and preparation. It is a concern that we extend to our customers at their sites. 

To accelerate the fight against food waste, we know that we need to act everywhere, from internal operations to global scale. We are proud, for example, to have been involved in the creation of the International Food Waste Coalition (IFWC). This coalition of companies and organisations has set itself the goal of combatting food waste and proposing a policy suited to this objective.  

We are also members of Champions 12.3, the World Resources Institute and ReFed, all of which are movements and initiatives providing targeted responses to the challenges of food waste. 

Everyday actions 

To reduce waste and protect natural resources and raw materials, we invest heavily in our teams through regular awareness-raising and training initiatives. We are convinced of the importance of sharing good practice, good actions and good tools! A number of day-to-day initiatives enable us to consolidate our commitment: