SABMiller Sets New Sustainability Targets for 2020

Sustainability is on every major company’s mind these days. Today, multinational brewing company SABMiller plc announced its own commitment to the subject, launching an escalation of its sustainable development programs and setting ambitious new goals to reach by 2020.

 “Today society faces major challenges and the stakes are getting higher: poverty, water scarcity, climate change, food security and alcohol-related harm all demand urgent attention to secure a prosperous future,” says Alan Clark, SABMiller Chief Executive Officer, in a statement released to the media. “These pressing issues are shared by communities, businesses and governments and we must solve them together.  Only those companies that are prepared to be part of the solution will be successful in the long term, and that’s why this approach is integral to our business strategy.”

This latest iteration of SABMiller’s sustainability strategy, dubbed Prosper, sets out to address five of these pressing issues mentioned by Clark. SABMiller lists these shared imperatives as:

• Reducing waste and creating a smaller carbon footprint throughout the supply chain;
• Supporting more responsible and sustainable land use;
• Promoting the acceleration of growth and social development through the company’s value chains;
• Utilizing standards and education to position beer as a natural choice for moderate and responsible drinkers, and;
• Securing shared water sources for use between SABMiller facilities and their surrounding communities and ecosystems

According to its Prosper plan, SABMiller has committed to resolving these issues by increasing its involvement on a local level to reach an ambitious new set of metrics that the company hopes to meet or exceed by 2020. These metrics include:

• Achieving a water efficiency target of 3.0 liters per liter of beer produced;
• Reducing carbon footprint by 25 percent per liter of beer produced, and by 50 percent overall, and;
• Directly supporting over half a million small businesses surrounding SABMiller facilities, in order to help drive local development

“Beer is essentially a local product, and we have deep roots in the local communities where it is brewed and consumed,” says Andy Wales, SABMiller Director of Sustainable Development. “Our business-focused approach to sustainability has already developed innovative models of watershed protection, created new beers using local crops such as sorghum and cassava, and driven significant cost savings from carbon and water efficiency. This is a natural next step to support our future growth path”