Operational review continued
Sustainability
As one of the world’s leading brewers, Heineken creates value and enjoyment for millions of people around the world through brewing, marketing and selling high-quality beers. We are proud of this.
At the same time, we are fully aware that we have an important role to play in society at large and in the lives of all our stakeholders. These include our employees, customers and suppliers who depend on us for their income, our consumers who enjoy our beers, our shareholders who seek a healthy return on their capital and the communities in which we operate which rely on us to be a good, corporate citizen.
In all of our actions, we seek to balance commercial reality with social responsibility. It is not an easy task and it ultimately means that we can never meet the expectations of all of our stakeholders all of the time. However, understanding their needs through dialogue improves our decision-making and helps us strike a better balance more of the time.
It is this philosophy that underpins our approach to sustainability and to meeting our obligations as a brewer. It was also a key driver behind our decision at the start of 2007 to focus on the seven areas where we as a business have the most impact on society:
- Energy consumption and CO2 emission
- Waste water consumption and discharge
- Safety of our employees and installations
- Quality and availability of raw materials
- Supply chain responsibility
- Responsible beer consumption
- Impact on developing markets.
Through focus, and the establishment of clear targets in each of these areas, we drive the continuous improvement in our sustainability performance. In 2007 we took a significant step, which reflected this philosophy and reinforced our long-standing commitment to responsible consumption, by becoming a founding company member of the European Forum on Alcohol and Health. This Forum brings together all stakeholder groups at a European level and seeks to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to addressing alcohol-related harm. In December 2007, we made a series of commitments to the Forum which built on the two pillars of our alcohol policy: adherence to our alcohol and work programme, training in and compliance with our internal Rules for Responsible Commercial Communication and the Enjoy Heineken Responsibly initiative. We are evolving our approach to promoting the responsible consumption of our products by developing strategic alcohol partnership programmes in many of our markets, designed to educate consumers and spread the responsible consumption message.
Alongside the Forum, we continued our participation in and membership of international industry groups such as the International Centre for Alcohol Policies (ICAP), Global Alcohol Producers Group and the Brewers of Europe. We also worked in local partnerships with other non-industry stakeholders to address specific issues associated with alcohol abuse.
In 2007, we began the roll-out of the Heineken Supplier Code to our operating companies. Although it is still too early to report specific results, the first comments we received from the relevant markets are promising. All our Group suppliers – representing a purchasing value of over €1.5 billion – have indicated that they are in compliance with our Code and integration of the Supplier Code in regular quality audits has started. Like every energy consumer, we are facing the global energy challenge: increased cost for fossil fuels due to a larger demand and decreasing social acceptance of CO2 emissions. To curb the increase of fuel consumption due to increased production, we have set a long-term target to improve efficiency of our energy consumption by 15 per cent in 2010 as compared to 2002. This target is integrated in our Total Productive Management programme and management systems, as a result of which the energy performance of each individual brewery is monitored on a quarterly basis.
We will never claim to be perfect or to have the balance exactly right. We are though pleased that in 2007, once again, our sustainability efforts were recognised by our continued inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (first within our global industry category) and membership of the FTSE4Good index.
We realise that we do not have the answers to every question. In 2007 our role as a signatory to the UN Global Compact increasingly enabled us to learn from other organisations in other industry sectors in different parts of the world.
More information about where we have and where we have not fully achieved our objectives can be found in our 2007 Sustainability Report, which will be published in April 2008. This report and other information can be found on our website and we invite you to read it and to let us know what you think.