Coffee giant Lavazza joins KLM’s corporate biofuel programme
Published Tue 25 Feb 2020
Italian coffee producer Lavazza will become the first Italian partner to join Dutch airline KLM’s Corporate BioFuel Programme, under an agreement signed by the two companies in February.
KLM’s programme actively contributes to making the aviation industry more sustainable by stimulating the availability of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) on a large scale. SAF is able to reduce carbon emissions by up to 85% compared to fossil fuels.
“KLM believes that the production of sustainable aviation fuels on the medium and long term is important in achieving carbon reduction targets in the aviation sector,” commented Barry ter Voert, senior vice-president for Europe at Air France KLM Group. “By partnering with companies such as Lavazza, we can achieve our aims much faster.
“KLM is not alone in its desire to make its operations more sustainable. Many companies in a variety of sectors think the same way. We are happy to enter into partnerships with companies to stimulate the availability of sustainable aviation fuel on a large scale as it makes the price more economically competitive with that of fossil kerosene. In this way, KLM aims to send a strong signal to all airlines to do more to promote sustainable aviation and greatly reduce our joint environmental footprint.”
Lavazza is the first Italian company to support the sustainable aviation fuel programme. “For Lavazza, the goal is to implement sustainability along the entire value chain and this agreement fits perfectly into the responsible development path that we have been pursuing for some time,” added Mario Cerutti, chief institutional relations and sustainability officer at Lavazza.
“Participating in the KLM BioFuel Programme shows that today it is not enough to act alone, but an organic effort is needed between all the players on the market, in a transversal way with respect to the sectors: it is up to the leading companies to take the first step.”
KLM has been using SAF on some of its flight since 2011, and is currently the only European airline using sustainable fuel on intercontinental flights. In May 2019, KLM committed to developing and purchasing 75,000 tonnes of sustainable kerosene annually for a period of ten years, making it the first airline to invest in SAF on a large scale.