In honour of its 50th anniversary, Norway-based Tomra, a provider of advanced collection and sorting systems, today announced its newly formulated mission statement addressing the future of resource optimisation. The company will undertake in the coming years to ‘transform how we all obtain, use and reuse the planet’s resources to enable a world without waste’.
The past fifty years, said Tomra President & CEO, Tove Andersen, have ‘prepared us to rise to the most pressing challenge of our time: reinventing the way the world manages waste’.
“We strive to lead the resource revolution, and our team of resource revolutionaries around the world are up to the challenge."
Tomra is a global player in the market for collection and sorting systems, with currently more than 100,000 installations around the globe and a workforce of over 4600.
To fight plastic waste, TOMRA has the ambition to enable 40% of plastic packaging produced globally to be collected for recycling by 2030. Currently, only 14% of all the world’s plastic packaging is captured for recycling, with just 2% being recycled in a "closed loop" (recycled for the same purpose, without being downgraded to lower quality plastic).
The company has also set the goal to collect 500 billion containers annually for Clean Loop Recycling, the company’s version of closed-loop bottle-to-bottle recycling. This reduces reliance the industry's reliance on virgin raw materials in the production of new containers and ensures fewer containers end upas litter or in landfills.
Tomra Collection, which develops reverse vending machines to enable beverage container recycling, currently captures over 40 billion drink containers each year. Its reverse vending machines enable 4.5 million tons in avoided carbon emissions each year.
However, the true impact of this recycling comes from the efforts of retailers, recycling centers and consumers around the world, said Harald Henriksen, EVP and head of Tomra Collection.
“We thank them all for making this milestone anniversary possible, and we look forward to working together on these ambitious goals."