Environmental stewardship

Integrated environmental management

Our environmental strategy addresses our most material environmental impacts and risks, and it emphasises our current focus on setting a strong foundation for environmental resource management. The strategy targets the establishment of routine management processes, strengthened data capture and reporting, optimised energy and water consumption, reduced carbon emissions, reduced solid waste and food waste, and enhanced energy and water security across all our manufacturing sites. Driving digitalisation, enhancing skills and competencies, building strategic partnerships and executing innovation are key enablers.

Management

Environmental management falls under our security, safety, health, and environment (SSHE) capability, and is managed through the group SSHE team ( see – SSHE). All our manufacturing operations are managed through a manufacturing excellence, customs and practices (MECP) management framework, supported by an ISO 14001 environmental management system at all sites. In accordance with these management systems, we have systematic processes in place at site level for identifying and assessing environmental impacts and risks, monitoring progress and performance, and auditing our management processes for compliance with our standards.

Operational environmental issues are identified at site level through regular site visits and routine impact and risk assessments are conducted annually. Environmental improvement plans are developed in response, with objectives and targets to control or eliminate the issues flagged for each site. Significant issues are escalated to higher levels of the business where necessary to inform the group's strategic risk management processes ( see – risk management). Procedures are in place to record environmental incidents, and every effort is made to record all incidents, including those that are minor. Root-cause analysis is conducted for all significant incidents, with corrective and preventive measures implemented in response. The SSHE team makes regular site visits to support the identification, control or elimination of environmental issues, and monitor incident reporting. Internal environmental audits are conducted annually for all sites except Chococam, and also include site visits to review compliance with group environmental policies, MECP and ISO 14001 SOPs, as well as to evaluate progress against site-level environmental improvement plans.

Enhancing skills and competencies is a key enabler of our environmental strategy. We aim to raise employee environmental awareness and deliver internal environmental training to build the knowledge and competencies of our staff in relation to key issues, procedures, roles and responsibilities. Resource constraints continue to limit our capacity to deliver ongoing environmental training. Our current training of new employees is precursory, with only basic environmental training provided one-off at site level. In 2023, we ran a campaign to promote our sustainability strategy across our operations ( see – our sustainability strategy), including posters of the strategy and related sustainability messaging at all sites.

Performance

We continue to invest in reducing our environmental footprint in accordance with the environmental stewardship pillar of our sustainability strategy. We are still focused on foundations, but are making progress on more strategic initiatives, particularly the implementation of our solar energy plan. Over the last few years, we have strengthened our environmental management practices, and improved our policy and legislative adherence. Our 2022 deep dive into our SSHE performance provided significant insight into our environmental performance and the challenges faced at our operations, which we have used to inform our environmental strategy and compliance efforts. In 2023, we took this work further, continuing to improve the accuracy and quality of our environmental data as far as possible using manual reporting methods.