2Sustain

Building on its agricultural roots and ongoing commitment to support the communities in which it operates, Del Monte Foods recently announced formalized environmental sustainability goals.

The company says it has heightened its focus on three specific areas: reducing waste, lowering water consumption and improving air quality.

For instance, Del Monte has committed to a 75 percent reduction in the amount of waste it sends to landfills (compared to a 2007 baseline), and the company wants to meet this goal by 2016. Both the Milk-Bone plant in Buffalo, New York, and the Del Monte Foods Distribution Center in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania are already zero-landfill facilities, meaning that 100 percent of their waste has been diverted from landfill. As a result of these and other efforts, Del Monte has reduced its waste to landfill by almost 70 percent, and so it appears the company is well on its way to achieving its goal.

In addition, Del Monte has committed to: (more…)

Yesterday, I wrote about Unilever’s new goals regarding sustainable packaging.  Today, MillerCoors is making headlines with its newly released 2010 Sustainable Development report, which reveals several significant corporate sustainability achievements over the past year.

For instance, looking specifically at environmental stewardship in 2009, MillerCoors: (more…)

Last week, General Motors announced that 62 of its manufacturing plants have achieved “zero landfill” status by recycling or reusing all normal plant wastes. (A chart listing the plants is available here.)

This significant achievement means that 43 percent of GM’s global manufacturing facilities no longer send any production waste to landfills. In 2008, the company announced that it wanted to convert half of its manufacturing facilities to zero landfill facilities by the end of 2010. As of this month, GM has met 87 percent of that goal.

On average, more than 97 percent of waste materials from GM’s zero landfill plants are recycled or reused and about three percent is converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities replacing fossil fuels. All in all, more than 2 million tons of waste materials –including 650,000 tons of scrap metal, 16,600 tons of wood, 21,600 tons of cardboard, and 3,600 tons of plastic –will be recycled or reused at GM plants worldwide this year alone.

An additional 45,000 tons will be converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities.

According to GM, even the smallest piece of waste is put to a productive reuse. For example: (more…)

The leading provider of flat-panel HDTVs to the lodging industry, LG Electronics USA, Inc., and the nation’s leading recycler, Waste Management, Inc. have teamed up to offer the first ever recycling program for hotel television sets and computer monitors. The program is planned for launch in 2010.
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I was invited to speak at the Forbes Ethisphere Conference in New York last week – an intimate “roundtable” style conference hosted by Steve Forbes and Forbes Magazine. The event was focused on business ethics, CSR and sustainability and attracted CEOs and senior executives from a wide array of companies ranging from Waste Management and Kelloggs to Pepsi and Mattel. I spoke about sustainable supply chains, and in particular the trends we’re witnessing around large enterprises using their leverage to enforce compliance, ethical and social responsibility standards upstream to their suppliers.

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