Responsible Production & the Circular Economy

Fish and seafood are precious resources to our planet and all who live on it, particularly for the people in some of the poorest countries in the world who rely on healthy fisheries for their primary source of protein.

This is the third in a series about food waste and the social license. You might recall from our first post that the concept of social license is about asking our customers to accept practices in the food experience that reduce waste. So far, we’ve discussed how the concept of the social license can reduce food waste in restaurants. Today we are going to tackle catering – a very complicated and difficult beast.

Beginning in 2012 and strengthened in 2014, Nestlé made a significant commitment on farm animal welfare, working with World Animal Protection, a global animal welfare organization and SGS, an independent auditor based in Switzerland, to assess our suppliers against specific commitments.

Our agricultural suppliers, particularly those in California, are acutely aware of the importance of sound water management and innovating in the face of water scarcity. When it comes to growing feed for his cows, dairy farmer Mike De Jager was an early adopter of technology that reduces water consumption.

Water is vital to our operations, used for washing and processing raw materials, cooling and cleaning equipment, hygiene and our bottled water business. We continue to reduce, reuse and recycle water across our business through water-saving innovations and technologies. Altogether, our U.S. factories are withdrawing 10% less water per ton of product than they did five years ago.

Let’s get real – individual investors have no sway in the public markets. The place where individual investors can have the most impact – by far – is in providing direct growth capital to private companies and social enterprises.

Given the new political landscape, what lies ahead for sustainable investing? How does our industry continue to move forward?

One of the most important efforts to trace whether conflict minerals are entering global supply chains is the Conflict Minerals Reporting Template (CMRT) developed by the Conflict-Free Sourcing Initiative (CFSI). The template is periodically updated to reflect new smelters, changes in regulations and other changes in the global supply chain network. CFSI has now released the CMRT version 4.20, which is now integrated into Source Intelligence’s robust SaaS platform to provide customers the most efficient and comprehensive data collection, validation and reporting system.

Whirlpool Corporation is breaking ground today on a project to build three wind turbines to help power its Marion, Ohio manufacturing facility. The three turbines will deliver wind generated power directly to the plant and when fully completed, are expected to provide approximately 19% of the total power consumption of the facility.

Reducing our climate impact is not only the right thing to do for the planet, it’s quite simply good business. I witness this every day across HPE’s global operations, where initiatives like renewable energy purchasing, building optimization and data center consolidation, all help our business run smarter, at less cost, and attract the favor of customers, investors, and employees.