The largest food company in the world, JBS, has taken another big step toward its goal of being Net Zero by 2040. The company is the first in the food industry to have an enterprise qualified to issue International Renewable Energy Certificates (International REC Standard / I-REC), which demonstrate that electricity is generated using renewable and environmentally responsible sources.

The certification was earned through Biolins, a thermoelectric plant owned by JBS that uses biomass like sugarcane bagasse, wood sawdust, and eucalyptus waste as raw materials for making electricity. The facility has a capacity of 45 MW, which is enough to power a city of 300,000 people. Based on the energy generated by the enterprise in 2021, Biolins can issue 113,400 certificates for the past year.

I-RECs are officially given out by Instituto Totum in Brazil. Businesses and industries can buy them to show that they use electricity from renewable energy sources like solar plants, wind farms, thermal power plants, and biomass power plants.

This enables certificate holders to offset so-called Scope 2 emissions, which include indirect CO2 emissions linked with the purchase of electricity for personal use, thereby contributing to their decarbonisation targets.

"This is an important milestone because it certifies that Biolins is environmentally clean and that it injects energy from a 100% renewable source into the National Interconnected System (SIN). This means that the holders of I-RECs issued by Biolins can prove that the energy consumed in their operations is clean," says the Director of Sustainability at JBS Brazil, Maurício Bauer. Currently, Biolins supplies 20% of JBS's electricity needs in Brazil.

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Source: JBS