At C&D Foods and its affiliates, we understand that environmental responsibility, sustainability and recyclability are all important matters for our customers and their customers, as we all reflect on what we can do to join the fight against climate change, protect resources and reduce waste.

Our aim is to rise to the challenge of doing more with less, for the benefit of our business, our customers and our planet, and we’re making great progress towards meeting our 2030 targets.

Recently we welcomed a new member of the team to help us drive even better environmental performance. Group Environmental Officer, Aideen Butler, has joined us from our parent company, ABP Group, where she was previously Environmental Manager for ABP Ireland with responsibility for energy reduction, waste water treatment, compliance, data monitoring, and environmental reporting across the Group.

We caught up with Aideen to get the inside track on her new role and what she loves about her job.

Q: What made you decide to take up this role at C&D Foods and its affiliates?

A: This is a really exciting time across the business in terms of environmental performance, with great progress being made towards our 2030 targets and lots of projects underway to help us achieve even more. I’m looking forward to understanding more about a different part of ABP Group and I’ll be implementing ISO 14001 & ISO 50001 here and working towards certification.

Q: What’s your new remit as Group Environmental Officer?

A: I’m responsible for ensuring we continue to meet our environmental targets and part of that will be identifying projects that help us do more with less, assessing how suitable they are for our sites and how much energy, water, waste and emissions they will help us save.

Compliance is also a big part of my role and, as we operate sites across Europe, that means making sure we’re compliant with both EU and country-specific legislation and standards.

But I won’t be doing it alone! Collaboration is also integral to my role. I will be engaging with our operational, engineering and management teams at each site to drive forward our sustainability agenda, and will also be working with customers and supply chain partners to see how we can help them achieve their targets too.

Q: How will you inspire people to get on board with environmental best practice?

A: We already have a great culture of sustainability across our sites, and I aim to build on that by encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration across all our sites. Every C&D location is different, with varying operational demands and approaches to cutting emissions and waste – but it’s clear that enthusiasm for sustainability is infectious across the team! My job is to harness and amplify that enthusiasm and empower the whole team to drive environmental best practice.

Q: What are your immediate priorities?

A: At the moment I am on a familiarisation tour of all our sites. I have visited sites in the UK, France, Denmark, and Ireland or course, and I’m planning to go to Spain and Austria next. It’s a great opportunity to meet the team, and understand the sustainability challenges and opportunities at each site.

Q: And what are your longer term goals?

A: I’m hoping we will reach our 2030 targets early, and I believe we can, but it needs to be right, not just fast, with everything verifiable, credible and genuinely making a difference to emission levels. And, of course, it won’t stop there – once we’ve achieved our scope 1, 2 & 3 reduction targets, our commitment to building a greener future will remain unwavering.

We are delighted to welcome Aideen to the team and wish her every success in her new role!