Waste paper is used for our cardboard cartons.

Waste management & recycling

One of Kimberly-Clark Australia’s core environmental objectives is to maximise recycling of all wastes and to stop sending manufacturing wastes to landfill.

The target of ‘no solid waste to landfill’ from any of our six manufacturing sites has been highly successful, with over 96% of our waste now being diverted from landfill.

Just one example of our commitment is the $3.4 million we spent on a nappy reclaim unit to recycle manufacturing waste in our Ingleburn Mill.

Kimberly-Clark’s high focus on quality means that our manufacturing sites end up with waste such as offcuts from rejected products, dust collection and used packaging. We have worked hard to find innovative ways to recycle these materials. Our core practices now ensure that:

• we recycle plastic shrink wrapping from raw materials, cores from rolls, and drums that supplied liquids, at all sites
• we collect broken wooden pallets to use in commercial compost
• we send waste sludge, twigs and tree knots from pulping and tissue to compost
• we separate material for recycling to avoid contamination of waste streams, e.g. separate bins for clean paper, cardboard and paper, general rubbish, wood, plastic and polythene
• we sort and put trimming wastes and rejects from tissue production back into the manufacturing process.

Packaging waste

Kimberly-Clark Australia was an early signatory to the National Packaging Covenant.

One major packaging change reduced our weight of packaging by 6,000 tonnes a year.