Cargill Sustainability Report: 4.9% Drop in GHG Intensity Over 2 Years

by | Aug 23, 2012

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Agricultural firm Cargill improved its greenhouse gas intensity by 4.9 percent during fiscal 2011 and 2012, according to the company’s 2012 corporate responsibility report.

Financial years 2011 and 2012 are the first two years of Cargill’s current five-year environmental goal cycle, due to finish in 2015. Its sustainability report does not provide figures for progress made in individual years. Cargill has a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas intensity by 5 percent over the course of the five-year cycle.

Renewable energy accounted for 13.5 percent of the company’s energy use in 2012, and contributed to the reductions in the company’s greenhouse emissions. Projects include a waste-to-energy plant being installed at a Canadian beef processing facility, which will increase the site’s ability to generate energy it uses in production by 80 percent. The new system will eliminate 21,000 metric tons of fossil fuel emissions annually and reduce the power the site brings in from outside by 1.4 MW, the report says.

A Cargill-funded biogas plant in South Korea turns livestock manure into energy through a fermentation procedure. The plant generates nearly 700,000 kWh of electricity per year.

In 2011, Cargill partcipated in the Carbon Disclosure Project for the first time. It earned a CDP score of 72, which is above the average score of 52 for all submitters, the company says.

Over the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years Cargill has improved its energy efficiency by 3.6 percent. The company hopes to improve its energy efficiency by 5 percent.

The company is currently partnering with two NGOs to set new industry standards on fuel efficiency for chartering vessels. Since June 2012, Cargill has been evaluating the fuel efficiency of each ship it uses, as part of the decision making process it uses to charter vessels. The company carried about 190 million metric tons of commodities on chartered vessels in 2011, and is now moving some of those charters away from the lowest-rated ships to vessels that operate more sustainably.

The company’s third goal is to increase its freshwater efficiency by 5 percent in the five years to 2015. Through fiscal 2011 and 2012 the company increased its freshwater efficiency by 4.8 percent.

The company is working in cooperation with the government in China, where agricultural irrigation accounts for about 60 percent of the country’s water consumption, on projects aimed at improving farm irrigation in rural areas. The company hopes that these projects, which include setting up best practice demonstration farms, will improve yields by 20 percent, reduce waste by 10 to 15 percent and conserve water. Cargill also says the projects help farmers in drought-hit regions such as Henan, Sichuan and Xinjiang provinces.

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