Kellogg’s and the Environment
The world's population is growing. As a result, natural resources are becoming more and more precious - so how do we all make sure there'll be enough food to go round?
As a food company, we at Kellogg’s are more aware than most how important it is to use these resources as efficiently as possible – in fact; we have a responsibility to do just that. However, like many of you, we’ve found that doing the right thing isn’t always straightforward.
There is a lot of information on ways to reduce energy, cut down on emissions or reduce packaging. But we need to be careful. Sometimes doing something which is positive for the environment can have a negative impact elsewhere.
A good example of this happened a few years ago when the use of biofuels was heralded as one of the significant solutions to climate change. But while this technology clearly does have a role in lower-carbon living, it soon became clear that poorly planned schemes could have unforeseen negative environmental and social consequences.
Making sure we do the right thing
So to help ensure we make the right choices, we’ve undertaken Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of our products, see the example for Special K below. LCA is a tool designed to assess the environmental impact of a product, process or service from its design to its disposal – what’s known as a ‘cradle to grave’ approach. This approach gives us our environmental footprint. Our LCA examined our business, from the crops in the field to the cereal in your breakfast bowl and on to waste disposal.
The environmental factors the assessment looked at included energy use, emissions, water use during growing, transport, cooking and disposal.
Our Global Environmental Targets
We've set ourselves a number of targets to meet by 2015, and are constantly checking our progress along the way so we can see how we're doing. By 2015, we aim to have reduced all of the following by 15-20% per metric tonne of food produced since 2005.
Energy use
Greenhouse gas emissions
Water use
Waste sent to landfill*
*For waste to landfill, we achieved a 41.5% reduction by 2009 and have set ourselves a new target of a further 20% reduction by 2015 against a 2009 baseline.
The Environmental Footprint of Special K
