Graphic Packaging report highlights progress toward sustainability commitments

Graphic Packaging, a global packaging company based in Atlanta, has released its 2024 impact report, "Toward a Better Future," highlighting its progress toward its Better by 2030 commitments announced last year as part of a multiyear Better, Every Day sustainability initiative.

The company’s sustainability goals include creating better packaging designed to drive circularity; doing better for people through safer work environments, engaging employees and local community involvement; and shaping a better future for the planet by reducing environmental footprint and sustaining forests.

"Our Vision 2030 strategy places more focus than ever on innovation across our business," Graphic Packaging President and CEO Michael Doss says. "Combined with our foundational commitment to sustainability, we are positioned to meet growing global demand for packaging innovations that are more circular, more functional and more convenient than existing alternatives."

Graphic Packaging highlights several milestones in its 2024 impact report:

Better Packaging

• approximately 1 billion plastic packages were replaced with paperboard packaging;
• 97 percent of packaging products sold were characterized as recyclable; and
• more than 130 new patent applications were filed.

Better for People

• over 20,000 employee engagement survey participants, or 87 percent;
• 47 percent increase in employee resource group participation; and
• 98 percent of global sites implemented Health Safety and Environment Excellence System.

Better Future

• 70 percent of EMEA, or Europe, Middle East and Africa, electricity use was covered by new virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA);
• 89 percent of purchased forest products were sustainably sourced; and
• approximately 1 million metric tons of the company’s generated scrap were recycled.

Graphic Packaging’s Better by 2030 commitments include near-term climate action goals the company is taking to advance its aspiration of net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 in accordance with the Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goal 13.

These goals include validated science-based targets to reduce GHG emissions across the company's operations and value chain, as well as commitments to increase the use of renewable fuel and electricity.

"We identified several ways to make sizeable GHG reductions, including upgrading to more efficient biomass boilers and steam turbines for cogeneration of steam and electricity at two of our wood-based paperboard manufacturing facilities," Graphic Packaging Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer Michelle Fitzpatrick says. "We are also exploring options to switch to 50 percent or more renewable electricity across all of our operations."

Graphic Packaging's first VPPA, announced in 2024, supports planned solar projects in Spain and is expected to come online late this year, enabling packaging operations in Europe to match 70 percent of the region's total electricity demand with renewable energy attribute certificates.

"Climate change remains one of society's most pressing challenges, and we are firmly committed to doing our part to limit global warming by achieving net-zero emissions by 2050," Fitzpatrick says.

The full Graphic Packaging 2024 impact report can be found here.