Carbon Footprint

We continue our commitment to focus on the impact of the production of individual products, throughout their life cycle, with emphasis on measuring carbon footprint profiles in line with ISO 14044 and BSI (PAS) 2050 specifications. This provides a standardised route to measure greenhouse gas emissions inherent within individual processes, from cradle to grave. The carbon footprint profiles will enable us to identify areas for process improvement, so as to ultimately reduce the greenhouse gas impact of our products and the data gathered will also be available to our customers so that they can complete product life cycle assessments.
 
In 2009, we successfully completed a pilot study in North America to assess the carbon footprints of individual products. We also initiated dialogue with academic organisations to assist in the development of appropriate data analysis tools. Our global research groups adopted the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry, encouraging the development of new lower carbon intensive products.

In 2010, the findings of the pilot study and work with a UK academic organisation enabled us to apply product profiling to more of our manufacturing sites, and we continued to play an active role in developing new tools and processes to analyse product carbon footprinting data.

During 2011, we expanded our carbon footprinting to all of our sites across the globe by implementing the tool we helped to design in 2010. We set a target to have this capability at more than half our sites by 2012, which was to allow us to provide customers life cycle information and also support our plans for process optimisation and energy reduction.  

By 2012 we had exceeded our target with trained personnel in carbon footprinting covering 76% of our manufacturing sites. We also started work on an Ingredient Sustainability programme, which will gather a wide range of environmental data on our products for our customers and for further internal analysis.  

Support and training on our carbon footprinting tool will continue, and during 2012 we will monitor the sustainability of new products by measuring the renewable raw material content and by assessing them against the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry. A gap analysis for the products within our Ingredient Sustainability programme will be completed by the end of 2012 to allow data gathering to start at manufacturing site level in 2013.