A Cleaner World : Extract from the 2018 Annual Report
A Cleaner World
“Climate change has far-reaching consequences for our business and the communities where we live and work, from water scarcity and energy constraints to reduced food security and increased health risks. Our own factory emissions, the packaging and trade refrigeration of beverages, all have a significant carbon footprint. We, therefore, strive for a cleaner world where natural resources are shared and preserved for the future.”
We will work with suppliers, distributors, retailers, municipalities and consumers to reduce emissions and waste across our value chain, and reuse and recycle waste and packaging and to conserve water.
Rethinking packaging and reducing waste. The Group believes in the use of returnable glass bottles as a trusted and effective way to reduce the environmental impact of our packaging as they are much more resource efficient than the one-way packages such as cans and PET. We are aware of the need for sustainable solutions to reduce litter from used primary packages such as PET and cans. We are working collaboratively with the environmental agency (EMA), local authorities and other environmental groups to intensify the education of consumers on segregation of litter, placement of litter in bins and general consciousness on a cleaner environment. The consumer waste cages that have been installed at major shopping centres are now being used to accumulate used cans and PET. The used cans are crushed and pressed into tin cake for export. The change over from steel to aluminium cans is largely complete, which creates secondary usage of the used cans. The PetrecoZim PET recycling factory is fully functional and can absorb all material that is recovered and delivered to it. This has now created income generating opportunities for waste collectors. We continued with the Make A Difference (MAD) campaign which enlists the support of community groups in taking care of the hygiene and cleanliness of the localities, discouraging littering particularly by motorists and the segregation of waste in the home. We are encouraging our employees to volunteer in the clean-up campaigns.
Eliminating waste from our production process: A significant amount of the waste from our brewing operations is organic material such as spent grains which are sold to farmers as stock feed
Injecting CO2 – Based HFC-free coolers: We continue to replace HFC refrigerants in our coolers; reducing global warming potential and energy demand. This also includes use of solar powered and low energy demand equipment.
Water and energy efficiency: Each production centre tracks the usages of water and energy against both internal and international benchmarks as part of the business key performance indicators. The key initiatives such as the light-weighting of primary and secondary packaging, the use of lightweight trailers, the use of natural lighting, installation of energy management devices and LED lighting have resulted in significant progress in the various energy usage measures. Beverage manufacturers consume significant amounts of water, as a scarce resource that we share with our communities. We therefore actively engage with local experts on watersheds, water ecosystems and sustainable water use in agriculture. We are aware that our local authorities face resource challenges in providing water to communities and hence our ongoing partnerships in alleviating some of the infrastructure challenges.
Reducing supply chain emissions: Our production and distribution processes use significant amounts of fossil fuels and generate CO2 emissions. We continue to record and analyse data on the levels of these emissions for
comparison to set benchmarks. There are ongoing collaborative efforts across the supply chain to implement projects that reduce CO2 emissions. We continue to work towards the specific commitments and target set by the global brewing and beverage companies relating to annual reductions in emissions.
