Food

Environmental management at Sara Lee Environmental compliance assurance has been an integral part of Sara Lee businesses throughout the history of the company. In the 1990’s we organized our compliance programs into GEMS, Sara Lee’s Global Environmental Management System. GEMS has been used as a platform for certification of our operations under ISO 14001 at 13 facilities in Europe and Asia. Soon after implementation of GEMS, we began to collect performance metrics annually in our Global Environmental Performance Measurements (GEPM) database. Since 2002, GEPM data has been used to drive performance improvements in our operations. Our GEPM data was compiled through the collective efforts of facility- based and corporate staff. Quarterly data are now entered into the central database, then reviewed and validated to confirm data accuracy.

The NPE2009 international plastics showcase was held June 22-26 in Chicago’s McCormick Place. While attendance was down from NPE2006, the preliminary total of visitor registrations numbered 44,000. Sustainability and energy efficiency was a prominent topic in the booths of exhibitors. Manufacturers of compressed air and injection molding equipment had many developments with Sustainability to show the visitors to NPE2009.

Cleanliness is often considered to be a virtue. In the beverage packaging industry, however, cleanliness is an absolute necessity.

In 2007, PepsiCo agreed on rigorous, corporation-wide global metrics to help us better track and understand our environmental footprint. Our goal is to reduce water consumption by 20 percent, reduce electricity consumption 20 percent, and reduce fuels consumption by 25 percent per unit of production by 2015 as compared to our 2006 consumption.