THE world's largest meat processor has become so obsessed with reducing its environmental impact that it has calculated its carbon footprint down to each individual pork chop.
At Danish Crown, being environmentally efficient is king not just because of the consumer and regulatory demands to do so, but because the cost savings from being green are so great.
Danish Crown slaughters almost 20 million pigs each year and is the name behind many well-known pork products in not just Denmark and Europe, but here in Australia too, sending about 30,000 tonnes of pig meat here every year.
But it's hard to believe that this company kills pigs for a living when visiting their new state of the art processing plant at Horsens, in Denmark's Jutland region, because it's so clean, bright, fresh and modern.
This is the most modern livestock processing plant in the world, built four years ago predominantly to reduce labour costs by introducing new levels of robotic processing machines, as well as meet new animal welfare standards.
But the 175-year-old farmer-owned company didn't let the opportunity to overhaul their facilities pass them by, using the chance to think and act green in every aspect of processing.
In the quest for complete environmental accountability, Danish Crown has put the equivalent of an environmental price tag on each pig slaughtered, which gives the company a benchmark to continue driving down emissions and waste.
Greenhouse emissions mapping has enabled Danish Crown to calculate that each pork chop has a climate change impact of 360 grams of CO2 equivalent.
They say this is the same as drinking four cups of coffee, driving one kilometre in a car, hoovering for 25 minutes or watching television for four hours and 45 minutes.
Corporate communications manager, Anne Villemoes, says waste had been reduced so significantly, that only the pig's scream was left.
But now that is gone too.
"If you look around the plant, there's no waste. Every part of the pig is used," Ms Villemoes said.
"We needed to be more efficient with our costs to compete in home markets in other countries.
"But this new plant made it possible to look at these growing environmental issues.
"We do a lot of things for the environment and to reduce our emissions – and it's not to be nice, it's the way to do business."
Simple changes, like storing the body heat from live pigs to provide the heat supply for the whole plant, is one example of the double benefits of thinking about environmental and cost efficiency as one.
Danish Crown is also the co-owner of Daka which now produce biofuel from the plant's bi-products, while the company has developed a lot of markets to buy food which would have otherwise been wasted or in recent years gone to Daka.
Amazingly, there is now even a special vacuum on the end of the knife used when the animal is slaughtered to save any blood and sell for use in other products, mainly concrete.
Ms Villemoes says the Horsens plant is acknowledged even by the animal protection groups as being one of the most humane slaughter facilities in the world.
"There's no screaming, no shoving or using of electrical devices. Here at the plant we say we'd rather have a heart transplant here than at any hospital because it is so clean," she said.
"It's a high cost - we say we spend 1 billion Danish Krone (A$220m) a year on food safety – that's the cost of cleaning and controlling."
Danish Crown's environmental manager, Charlotte Thy, said even though not all aspects of the impact of meat production and processing on the climate have been mapped with sufficient precision at present, it's already known that since 1990, Danish farmers have reduced emissions of greenhouse gases by 23 per cent when measured in terms of CO2 equivalents.
The agricultural sector is responsible for 19pc of total emissions of greenhouse gases in Denmark.
At Danish Crown they now know that the production of one kilogram of pork results in the emission of 3.6kg of greenhouse gases when including feedstuffs production and farm buildings - these emissions have been reduced by 16pc in the 10 years to 2005.
Greenhouse gas emissions are still generally lower for the production of 1kg of vegetables in comparison with 1kg of meat.
"Greenhouse gas emissions from the Danish pork value chain can be characterised as follows - emissions of greenhouse gases from the long-distance transport of meat are low compared with greenhouse gas emissions from farm buildings and feedstuffs production.
"Greenhouse gas emissions from slaughterhouses are low, despite the use of both electricity and heating, when compared with feedstuffs production.
"Most of the greenhouse gases stem from feedstuffs production, farm buildings and manure."
She said as more knowledge becomes available, a full mapping of the Danish Crown Group’s impact on the climate will become possible.
"At the same time, this will make it easier for us to introduce improvements and specify targets."
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