Valer Hancas, Kaufland Romania: “Retailers must be anchors of responsibility in the society“

“At Kaufland we have over 500,000 unique customers every day in our 152 stores across Romania. The number of packages we sell is tens of thousands. When we talk about the circular economy, we have to think about one thing: it is a marathon that never ends. We will probably have to establish new principles and strategies in 10 years. Romania is not yet ready to start the recycling marathon.

The good news is that we started the marathon, but we still have a lot of work to do before we set records. There are also good prospects. Studies show that 6 out of 10 young people are informed – before making a purchase – about the responsibility and involvement of that brand in environmental protection acts,” Valer Hancas, Communication Director & Corporate Affairs, Kaufland Romania said during Circular Economy Conference organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“In 2019, we replaced disposable bags with biodegradable bags for a fee. The cost was low, but you know the customer is sensitive to change and we took a risk. Kaufland was a trendsetter because there is currently no retailer that can provide these bags for free.

In the first month after the implementation of the project, the consumption of transport bags decreased by 60%. The trend has continued. This is where the brand’s reputation comes in. The customer does not interact with the product on the shelf – we have over 25,000 products – but all are under the dome of this brand.

Retailers must be anchors of responsibility in society, we should be a source of information for our consumers.

Kaufland is the only company in Romania that has equipped all 152 stores with containers for collection. This project was started in 2018 and we will not stop here. We make serious calculations regarding the future collection quota. In proximity areas we may even need 2-3 collectors depending on their capacity to take on all three types. In one week we managed to collect 600,000 packages.

For the “Change PET with the ticket” we initially estimated that we will have about 2,500 users. The campaign was implemented in partnership with the Act for Tomorrow Association. It had two perspectives. The first was the importance of selective collection on certain types of waste and the second was the use of public transport. The results exceeded our expectations and we had over 6,000 participants, over 12,000 tickets awarded. We also had the support of the Ministry of Environment for this campaign carried out in Constanta, Brasov, Cluj, Iasi and Sibiu.“

Full recording of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oonbexyNmcw&t=9905s