Our Carbon Footprint. What is it?Our Carbon Footprint is an estimate of the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by the production of one litre of Highland Spring water, and it’s expressed as ‘Carbon Dioxide Equivalent’ or CO2e. At Highland Spring we feel strongly about the importance of measuring our Carbon Footprint. It is a key part of our environmental strategy, helping us to minimise our environmental impact and reduce it over time. While it’s only one element of the overall environmental and sustainability picture, we feel it’s an important measurement to keep track of.
Establishing our Carbon Footprint We have been working with Zenith International (experts in the bottled water industry), The National Science Foundation (NSF - an international standards setting and audit organisation) and Trucost (industry leading environmental research organisation) since 2007 to establish our Carbon Footprint.
Our calculations start from the production of crude oil (used in the manufacture of our packaging materials) and measure the direct and indirect emissions from that point to the delivery of our product to retailers and wholesalers.
Our current Carbon Footprint is 176g CO2e per litre in 2007.
Why is it important? We want to minimise our environmental impact, and by constantly striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions we can help to do that. Through examination of our Carbon Footprint we were able to identify where emission savings can be made, and we’re already taking steps towards doing just that.
What else is Highland Spring doing? We’re setting some challenging goals in each part of our business.
For example, in 2008 we installed an ‘Air Recovery System’ to help reduce our annual energy usage and we expect to see savings of 1.25M kilowatts every year.
We’re also working hard to reduce the amount of packaging material we use. For example, by making our plastic bottles lighter, we have reduced our annual PET (polyethylene terephthalate) usage by 110,000 kg - and we’re not stopping there.
With evolving technology we will continue to review our packaging and processes to see how other reductions can be made, including taking advantage of recycled packaging materials. The amount of recycled materials available does influence the volume we are able to use in our production process, but in 2008 more than 15 million Highland Spring bottles were produced using 25% recycled PET. We expect this to rise to 50 million bottles in 2009 as we increase our use of recycled materials across our business.
By continually reviewing how we package and distribute our product we have managed to reduce our annual usage of corrugated cardboard by 55,000kg and saved the equivalent of 25,000 road miles in transportation.
Our Carbon Footprint in Context?The area of Carbon Footprinting is still relatively new and producing a full footprint is a complex task for a business such as ours. There is currently a lack of consistency across business in the calculation and reporting of carbon footprints, making it difficult for consumers to compare published footprints. In the interests of clarity and comparability we are evaluating PAS 2050 (a Publicly Available Specification assessing the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services).
Highland Spring is as committed to protecting the earth as it is to protecting the piece of the land from where its pure water is drawn.