Sustainable transport via our own unloading quay on the Leie
We strive for 'One Planet’ products. Grown, produced and transported without exhausting the planet. That's why we always try to source our ingredients from Europe, close to our factories, as much as possible. Ingredients we can't grow locally are transported by sea to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible. The Leie river also started playing an important role in our sustainable transport story.
How do you combine more exporting with fewer CO2 emissions?
Our export volumes have been slowly increasing over the past years. This is why we turned to the advice centre for multimodal transport, Multimodaal.Vlaanderen and provincial agency POM West-Vlaanderen. . Together with our Logistics colleagues, they researched the feasibility of transporting our export containers with Alpro products to the Port of Antwerp via our own quay on the Leie.
The potential is very impressive: 2500 containers per year are equivalent to 5000 lorry journeys via the E17. By making good use of the Leie, we can reduce the number of road kilometres to zero and reduce the CO2 emissions on the route Wevelgem-Antwerp by 71%.
Wim Muylaert, Logistics Manager at Alpro, hopes to make optimum use of all the river's potential in the future: “After successful test runs, around 250 containers travelled down the river to Antwerp between January and May 2021. And there will be a whole lot more in the future. We want to ship more than 500 containers per year via our own quay, in addition to the already existing import of more than 500 containers of soya beans per year via the Leie. We're addressing two of society's major challenges : mobility and climate.”
From now on our delicious Alpro products will often be 'sailing' sustainably to the consumer.
This is one of the many actions we're taking to combat climate change. Want to learn more? Read our action plan for health and sustainability 'Feeding our Future with Plants'.