Crown Holdings Inc.: Raising standards internally and along the supply chain
Jennifer Bogs, Director of Global Sustainability at Crown Holdings Inc. discusses how the ASI Standards have supported Crown in elevating their sustainability efforts, enhancing the Twentyby30™ program through improved due diligence, biodiversity planning, and greater transparency in the aluminium supply chain.
7 June 2024
Raising our standards
Crown is committed to conducting our business in the most responsible way possible. With ASI as the world’s leading organisation in the responsible sourcing of aluminium, our ASI membership means that we’ve raised standards for ourselves, our customers and our suppliers up and down the supply chain. We are looking deeply at the ASI Standards and increasing the level of transparency, our due diligence and risk management planning.
Increasing due diligence, embracing biodiversity and enhancing collaboration
Crown has embraced a new way of looking at how we conduct business because of ASI, and there have been changes implemented to be in line with ASI Certification. For example, biodiversity is a new area in sustainability, and we have increased the level of due diligence and developed robust biodiversity plans that were not in place before joining ASI. In addition to the IBAT desktop assessment, we contracted a biodiversity expert to conduct our first visual on the ground assessment of biodiversity impacts in two of our regions. Now we have the mitigation strategies and will be implementing them.
It’s eye-opening just how much ASI touches on and to the deeper level that ASI does. For example, we have expanded the scope of our due diligence, and our legal and procurement teams are working on ensuring that we have the necessary checks and balances in place for the aluminium supply chain. We have done a more in-depth review of human rights impacts via the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA), which we are conducting regionally. We’ve been able to drill down into our operations and ask questions we were not asking previously, prompting us to investigate even further. The HRIAs will serve us in other areas of company action, for example, evaluating materiality and looking at it from the outside in. We have increased collaboration within the company and there’s learning back and forth. The executive leadership teams are being educated on biodiversity and, in turn, the wider team is being educated on what it means to conduct due diligence of the supply chain.
It has been refreshing to see that the ASI Standards are balanced and do not look at any one principle to the exclusion of others. For example, many organisations place a lot of emphasis on climate but not as much emphasis on other areas such as water and biodiversity. With this approach, one loses sight of the nexus and how interrelated these subject areas all are. At Crown as part of our Twentyby30TM sustainability program, we have as many water goals as we have climate goals, and so we agree with elevating the importance of the broader scope of sustainability.
Elevating our different sustainability programs
Our sustainability goals and program are very broad reaching. We have goals on climate, renewable energy, emissions reduction, water reduction and replenishment, circularity – increasing the recycled content of products, increasing recyclability of our products, safety and diversity, to name a few.
We are proud of how Crown has elevated its Twentyby30TM Best Practices Program in recent years and increased information sharing and learning between our plants. The Best Practices Program ensures that our several hundred plants are open and communicative about what they’re doing. That way, the good work that is being done in one plant is shared across the other plants and implemented. The Program has enabled us to identify projects that have yielded energy and water savings and increased safety measures – multiplying the wins and ideas across the different sites.
We have made strides in our renewal energy procurement and water replenishment. As RE 100 members (Renewal Energy) we have a goal to be 100% renewable. We have increased our water replenishment projects, with a goal to replenish 100% of the water that is consumed back to the same region from where it was consumed. We’re doing this through funding projects at grass roots level, working with NGOs, and engaging in projects that directly replenish water. For example, we have a project conserving trees in Brazil and strengthening water systems to have less water loss, providing for regenerative agricultural projects and sharing it with farmers.
We participate in charitable giving programs through our plants who nominate charities that are near and dear to their hearts.
We work through industry partners like Can Manufacturers Institute, Food Industry Asia, Metal Packaging Europe, Abralatas and CANAFEM, among others to improve recycling rates in our global markets and to lead to the implementation of better legislation to yield improved recycling results.
ASI helps to elevate our program and makes sure we are aware of the material impacts that are out there. It has also strengthened the “never compromise” pillar on responsible and ethical sourcing, from our Twentyby30TM sustainability program. With Responsible Sourcing, we’ve made progress in assessing our core suppliers and now we’re looking to expand that and have the rest of our suppliers assessed as well. We have also made good progress under this pillar regarding identifying chemicals of concern to make sure we’re working with products that are safe for customers.
Continuous Improvement
While we are proud of what we have achieved so far, we continue to advance and elevate our performance. On Climate, we’re focusing on what types of new and existing technologies can be leveraged to meet our goals, increasing our renewal energy procurement, installing solar panels at our different locations and reducing the energy load on gas.
With Water, we have set company-wide water quality standards for our locations to abide by and we continue to seek and implement more water replenishment projects globally.
Circularity is also another focus. We’re establishing targets and increasing local engagement to influence legislation, increase recycling rates through more recycling collection equipment, support informal recycling measures and increase recycled content in products.
We are being proactive about identifying safety risks and mitigating those risks, to achieve our aim of reducing the number of injures at our sites.
To improve our diversity, we continue to train and educate employees and review our programs and policies regarding hiring to ensure we are being inclusive.
We remain committed to improving our performance on these goals and to creating more positive impacts in future.
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