This article was originally published on Environmental Leader.
“Water is a moving environmental target. In 2015, MillerCoors set several ambitious water-related sustainability goals for 2020, including reducing the water-to-beer ratio across all their direct operations. The total of water gallons saved over five years across their whole value chain is expected to be in the billions. Since the majority of their water footprint is on the agricultural side, however, this is not a goal MillerCoors can achieve alone.
“The targets have a significant magnitude,” says Marco Ugarte, PhD, sustainability manager for MillerCoors. “The only way to achieve them is through a deep level of partnership with other organizations.” As a result, the company has connected with diverse public and private partners.
…Many companies are already looking at the Natural Capital Protocol, a framework that starts thinking about how you value the natural capital of companies based on their operations, including how organizations interact with nature and the role of context-based metrics. For the first time, global and domestic organizations are realizing that the price of resources, for example water, is not what you pay the utility. The price is the impact on the aquifer, sourcing from one place versus another, the quality, and the potential impacts on the community.
Now, more than ever, companies are open to benchmarking, identifying best management practices, and importing them from completely different industries. I think that while the targets will be increasingly challenging, it’s a race to the top…”
Read on at: Environmental Leader.
