JBS, one of the world’s largest food companies, has taken another significant step toward becoming Net Zero by 2040. The company is the first in the food industry to have a qualified enterprise to issue International Renewable Energy Certificates (International REC Standard / I-REC), demonstrating that electricity is generated using renewable and environmentally responsible sources.
The certification was obtained through Biolins, a JBS-owned thermoelectric plant that generates electricity from biomass such as sugarcane bagasse, wood sawdust, and eucalyptus waste. The facility has a 45 MW capacity, which is enough to power a 300,000-person city. Biolins can issue 113,400 certificates for the previous year based on the energy generated by the enterprise in 2021.
In Brazil, I-RECs are officially distributed by Instituto Totum. Therefore, businesses and industries can purchase them to demonstrate that they use renewable energy sources such as solar plants, wind farms, thermal power plants, and biomass power plants.
This allows certificate holders to offset Scope 2 emissions, which include indirect CO2 emissions associated with purchasing electricity for personal use and thus contribute to their decarbonization 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.
