WATERBURY, Vt. – Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. has recently launched its tenth annual Sustainability Report.
The report focuses on Keurig’s efforts to strengthen its global corporate citizenship and sustainability leadership, highlighting recent sustainability initiatives, progress against the Company’s 2020 sustainability targets, and a new water stewardship target.
The report underscores accomplishments and opportunities within Keurig’s sustainability practice areas, with a particular focus on water stewardship, supply chain resiliency, and sustainable products – especially K-Cup recyclability.
“In our fiscal 2014, we looked inward to ensure we are integrating sustainability into everything we do, from our operations to our business planning,” said Brian Kelley, Keurig’s President and CEO.
“Building a sustainable organization takes time, vision, and persistence. We’re proud of where we are now, and realistic about the challenges that lie ahead.
We’re deeply committed to becoming more sustainable through relentless, incremental improvements that allow us to get a little bit better each and every day.”
Keurig has achieved solid progress against several 2020 targets ranging from increased waste diversion from landfill to employee engagement.
Said Monique Oxender, Keurig’s Chief Sustainability Officer, “This year, we focused on identifying the opportunities and building the processes and partnerships necessary to deliver on our 2020 sustainability targets — steps that will also be integral to delivering on our core business objectives.
We couldn’t do it without the engagement of employees across the organization, who enable us to continue to translate our company values into action.”
Highlights from this year’s sustainability report include the following:
Sustainable products: K-Cup recyclability
A top sustainability priority for Keurig is ensuring that 100% of K-Cup packs are recyclable by 2020. Keurig is taking a holistic approach to finding a solution to this challenge, focusing on product design, recycling infrastructure, and the end market development for the materials.
The Company expects to make significant progress well before 2020, and is currently testing key design concepts for a K-Cup pack that can be easily separated and readily recycled.
Keurig is collaborating with the recycling community and its partners to ensure that K-Cup packs aren’t just recyclable in theory, but can also be effectively recycled in the majority of communities.
This includes supporting efforts to expand the recycling infrastructure so more materials can be conveniently recycled in more locations.
In 2014, Keurig committed to investing $5 million over five years in recycling solutions via the Closed Loop Fund, a coalition of companies that are providing essential investments required to meet some of the larger challenges to recycling access in the United States.
Water Stewardship
Access to and availability of water is critical throughout Keurig’s value chain and is intertwined with other global challenges such as climate change and the need to feed a growing population.
Within this complexity, Keurig is addressing water stewardship opportunities with a new 2020 target and by engaging its network of partners and consumers to expand the impact of its efforts.
The Company’s new 2020 water stewardship target is to balance, ounce for ounce, the water used in all of Keurig’s beverages.
For every cup consumers brew, Keurig’s target is to restore the same amount of water for natural and community uses.
Keurig is developing quantifiable projects, with an emphasis on those that build or promote natural water management infrastructure, provide source water protection, and restore river and streambank zones and urban waters.
Keurig’s approach to water stewardship aims to be both responsive and restorative. Keurig intends to optimize resources through efficient use of water in our own operations; balance the water used in all our beverages through projects that restore an equal volume of water; and connect people to clean water sources.
The company achieved a significant milestone in 2014, convening more than 130 leaders from the companies within the Keurig partner network, as well as from the public and NGO sectors at its first annual water summit, CURRENT: Collaborating for a Water-Secure World.
This summit sought to identify opportunities to overcome barriers and collaborate on solutions for key water challenges at home and across the globe. Keurig will reconvene this invited group at the second annual CURRENT event in Vermont, September 2-3, 2015.
Resilient Supply Chain
Keurig’s responsible sourcing and supply chain outreach programs aim to provide its suppliers, their employees, and their communities with the skills and tools to build a foundation of resilience that will help improve their business practices and employees’ livelihoods while ensuring a long-term, sustainable supply of high-quality products and ingredients.
In early 2014, Keurig set corporate targets to help improve livelihoods and provide access to clean water in supply chain communities. Work performed in supply chain communities in 2014 showed significant overlap in the impact driven by these two workstreams.
As a result, water security is being folded into a revised supply chain livelihoods target. In fiscal year 2014, more than 383,000 people were positively impacted through Keurig-funded partner projects in its supply chain.
Keurig has also committed to source 100% of primary agricultural and manufactured products by 2020 according to its established responsible sourcing guidelines.
In fiscal year 2014, Keurig released updated guidelines to suppliers that reinforce the Company’s efforts to help suppliers meet its high standards for quality, safety, and social and environmental responsibility.
Knowing where products originate is the first step towards responsible sourcing and 64% of the Company’s coffee was traceable to source in fiscal year 2014.
Full details of Keurig’s 2014 Sustainability Report can be found at this link.
