Reducing CO2 Footprint to Protect Global Food Supplies
We recognize we play a critical role in helping to combat climate change and have increased our focus on ways to continually reduce our CO2 emissions from manufacturing. We adopted a science-based approach to reduce our absolute CO2 emissions from manufacturing by 15 percent by 2020. This aligns with current approaches to support the global effort to limit climate change to less than 2º C.
Since 2013, we reduced CO2 emissions from our factories by 10 percent by improving energy management systems and investing in energy efficient technologies in our factories. We are also cutting CO2 emissions by using low-carbon renewable energy sources. In our Curitiba and Vitória de Santo Antão (VSA) factories in Brazil, we’re generating bioelectricity by burning sugarcane residues, saving an estimated 10,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions. In France, we have installed on-site solar panels at three plants: La Haye-Fouassière, Granville and Besancon. And in the Philippines, our Sucat plant is converting to 100 percent geothermal electricity, saving 4,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
As part of our commitment to minimize our end-to-end CO2 emissions, we signed a renewable energy partnership in the U.S. with Enel Green Power. Through this agreement, we will purchase the energy delivered to the electricity grid from a 65 MW portion of EGP’s Roadrunner project, a solar farm in Texas, United States. The energy purchased is enough to produce more than 50% of all the Oreo cookies consumed in the U.S. annually. That’s around 10 billion Oreo cookies per year! This agreement enables us to make substantial progress against our sustainability goals by reducing 80,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions or 5% of our total manufacturing emissions (compared to 2013).
