Valer Hancaș, Director for Communication & Corporate Business, Kaufland Romania, presented the company's achievements and future plans regarding well-practices in the industry.

"More than ever, I think that responsibility represents a chance for the future for all of us, everything regarding industry players", said Valer Hancaș.

Currently, Kaufland Romania implemented two projects dedicated to selective collection of the waste in our country.

The first started in 2018 as a voluntary action and it implies that in each of the nearly 160 stores that Kaufland has in Romania, customers can return plastic, aluminum and glass packaging.

Should they choose to do this, they will receive a reward for their effort, which comes as a gift card which changes on a weekly basis "depending on the principles developed with the industry."

Valer Hancaș said that in the first seven months of 2022, over one million customers have recycled various products and packaging with the help of the system and benefited from the company's offers.

This helped Kaufland collect 9 million pieces of packaging, which helped prevent them from reaching landfills.

The second system implies recycling other types of packaging that were considered waste and, thus, ended up in landfills, without being selected.

"We developed this second system which is very basic, but it has a positive emotional impact and we are talking about very hard to recycle materials, such as cleaning products and toothpaste tubes among others", said Valer Hancaș.

At first, this system was implemented in five stores, but as the interest grew among customers, so did the company's efforts to implement it country-wide.

Recisacul is another project implemented by Kaufland in Romania for its employees to encourage them to recycle suitable materials.

With this action, the company was able to collect in the first two months around 5.000-6.000 bags of recyclable materials from the employees.

The latest recycling effort project that Kaufland will soon install in its stores is the one that will be using intelligent bins, which should be able to automatically sort waste according to their type.

At first, this solution will be available only in three stores, also due to economic reasons, but if it becomes popular among customers, it will be extended to most stores in the future.