6. Environment >
6.2 Energy Use & Air Emissions >
6.2.3 Emissions
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Goal
In 2002, to proactively address the impact of our business on global climate change, Ben & Jerry’s set a goal to reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from our manufacturing process by 10% over 5 years. The end of 2006 marked the end of this five year period, and our data indicate that we successfully met our goal.
Collecting the relevant data to track our progress was not as simple as it might seem. For example, subsequent to setting the goal, we closed our Springfield manufacturing site and Distribution Center. We also began co-packing Good Humor-Breyers ice cream in our St. Albans, Vermont facility and moved production of Ben & Jerry’s novelties out of Vermont to Unilever plants elsewhere. These changes complicated our efforts to measure against a baseline, but we were still able to reliably evaluate CO2 reductions by plant.
2006 CO2 emissions
In evaluating our CO2 emissions to meet our 2007 goals, we looked at the data in two different formats: normalized (CO2 emissions per gallon of product) and absolute (total tons of CO2 emissions).
On a normalized basis, by the end of 2006, we had reduced our CO2 emissions by 32% below 2002 levels. We recognize that our production volume was up almost 50% over the same period, so clearly efficiencies in our production process helped us reach and surpass our 10% reduction goal.
On an absolute basis, our Company’s CO2 emissions increased only 2% from 2002-2006. Clearly our energy saving initiatives over the past several years had a positive effect.
Check out a few examples of changes we made in 2006 to reduce energy use and CO2 emissions.
In addition to our emissions reduction efforts, we have also continued to purchase “green tags” from NativeEnergy to offset 100% of our CO2 emissions from our manufacturing sites.