Report overview
The company began issuing integrated reports starting with its 2011 annual report, which won the Most Innovative Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure Policy Award from Corporate Secretary magazine.
The 2013 report itself – available as a PDF and website – is curiously light on numbers, and does little to alert readers to the fact that many more precise metrics can be found on the company’s corporate responsibility website.
According to the website, at the end of 2011, four years into a six-year goal period, Clorx exceeded three of its four goals – and therefore reset its goal period to a 2012-2020 time frame.
Clorox is reporting at a GRI-checked application level of “B+.” A summary of its integrated report from 2012 can be found here.
Energy
Over the past five years, Clorox reduced its energy consumption by 15 percent on an intensity basis (per case of product sold) and 11 percent on an absolute basis. Clorox has contracted with an outside bill pay agency that pays all of its energy bills, and provides access to a web-based database that allows facility managers to track and minimize energy usage.
Clorox has installed motion sensors for lighting in all North American facilities, and says it is continuing to expand its lighting retrofit program to all international locations. The company says it completed energy audits at all its North American facilities in 2011, to identify operating equipment and HVAC systems efficiencies, and initiated energy audit workshops in international locations.
Clorox’s general office in Oakland, California is one of only 38 buildings in the US to achieve the LEED – Existing Buildings Platinum certification, the company says. Building improvements included replacing over 1,700 lamps with more eco-efficient lighting, installing a white reflective roof, and installing high-efficiency boilers and water heaters, as well as replacing every plumbing fixture, toilet and urinal to reduce water consumption by over 40 percent.
The company does not say what proportion of its overall energy or electricity consumption comes from renewables, though it does buy RECs to offset all electricity use within the Oakland offices – about 1.4 percent of its total annual electricity consumption – as well as the building’s natural gas use. Clorox division Burt’s Bees “essentially offsets” its Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions, equal to about 0.5 percent of the company’s total GHG emissions, the company says.
Much of the heat from the company’s Kingsford retort furnaces, which turn renewable wood scrap into char, gets used to dry waste wood raw material as well as finished charcoal briquets, and to power steam boilers for other Kingsford manufacturing operations. This use of waste heat reduces the amount of fossil-fuel electricity that plants need to pull from the grid, Clorox says.
