Blog

1 December 2017

Our commitment to growing a sustainable future

A blog from our Head of Advocacy, Katharine Teague

Sustainability is crucial to the success of our business and the relationships that we build with customers, stakeholders and local communities. Last year, we set out our new framework Global Mind, Local Champions which plots out our approach towards  a more sustainable and responsible future. We are now focusing on this framework to grow a more sustainable future and ensure we operate responsibly in every local market.

Global Mind, Local Champions focuses on three core pillars that are vital to making our business more sustainable: building rural economies, creating thriving and healthy communities and ensuring responsible natural resource consumption. By delivering this framework in these three areas across the group, I believe we can be the world’s leading sustainable sugar business to the benefit of our businesses, our customers, our stakeholders and local communities in which we operate. This ambition drives our day-to-day activity and the way in which our businesses act on the ground across their end-to-end supply chain.

Over the past 12 months, we have made good progress on each pillar including: using renewable energy to source 58% of energy consumption; recycling 65% of waste generated across our Group; and we have introduced new training programmes and support initiatives for employee health, safety and wellbeing. Our approach to sustainability has received external recognition this year with success at the UK’s Business in the Community Awards, British Renewable Energy Awards and China Britain Business Council Awards. Further examples of which can be found in the latest CR Report update.

Looking ahead – our three focus areas

While we have come a long way over the past year, there is still much more that we can do. Our attention over the next 12 months will focus on three key areas:

Embedding sustainable agriculture across our operations

In the marketplace we are operating within, it is increasingly important to produce sugar as efficiently and responsibly as possible. This is not only from a commercial standpoint but also from an environmental one as growers face ever greater challenges posed by climate change and declining natural resources. Improving yield, creating more from less for farmers, increasing productivity and developing robust crops year-on-year will remain crucial to addressing this. We will look for new innovations to continue growing crops in a way to safeguard the future of the next generation.

Reducing our footprint on the world

Despite our achievements in reducing waste and moving towards a truly circular economy, we know we can achieve more in water stewardship and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in particular. Part of our work next year will be assessing how we can better measure our performance in these two areas, identify issues where we can focus on to reduce our footprint and help set an ambitious vision for the long-term future. We will also continue to work on making the most out of every stick of cane and root of beet, aiming for minimal waste from the sugar production process.

Scale up our positive social impact

The global nature of our business and the thousands of growers we partner with means we take our relationships with local communities very seriously. We will strive to continue to be a good neighbour in each of the countries we operate in and will adapt this global approach to suit local needs and priorities. A key part of this will be continuing our work to help educate consumers on the role sugar can play in the diet through our Making Sense of Sugar campaign in the UK and abroad. We will also be working with Illovo to build on its internationally acclaimed success on land rights in Africa to become an innovative thought leader in this space.

These priority areas cannot be delivered in a silo. We want to work with partners across the globe as well as share best practice internally to maximise outcomes. By working together in 2018, we can continue on our journey to creating a more sustainable and reliable future.