Social Responsibility

Environment

Tate & Lyle believes that companies must take steps to manage their impact on the natural environment. As a consequence, we are committed to conducting our business in a manner that is sensitive to the environmental needs of the communities within which we operate. We aim to achieve this by upholding defined, key environmental standards in all of our operations, and we actively encourage our business partners to demonstrate similar levels of commitment.

All our locations fully integrate environmental management into their operational systems and procedures. The Board reviews environmental performance and our policy annually.

Download Environment Mission Statement

Download Group Environment Policy

Overview

Managing our impacts to produce a more positive result is good for the environment and also brings economic benefits to Tate & Lyle. When reviewing our environmental footprint, it has always been Tate & Lyle's policy to focus particularly on those impacts that have most effect on the environment and over which we have direct control. Our three most significant environmental impacts are, in order of magnitude, energy use, water use and non-hazardous solid waste production. Energy use is by far our most significant impact, and we therefore give it the highest priority.

The water treatment plant at our Sagamore, Indiana,
plant has reduced water discharge to the city of
Lafayette by 330,000 gallons per day.

Carbon footprint

In 2007, with the help of environmental consultancy URS, we developed a carbon footprint model to measure the impact of our operations on the environment. We began by measuring the carbon footprint of our UK cane sugar refining business from sugar cane field to supermarket shelf. This is known as secondary carbon footprint data, as it covers cultivation to disposal. Raw cane sugar milling is almost carbon neutral. Cane grows in the field, waste fibre from the cane powers the factory and the cane re-grows each year, usually up to five times without the need for replanting. It is then transported to our European refineries by ship. Our current secondary carbon footprint is around 0.43 tonnes of CO2 per one tonne of sugar produced, which means that the carbon footprint of a bag of sugar made from cane sugar is currently about half that of beet sugar. The carbon footprint of cane sugar produced at our Thames Refinery will be reduced by 25% when our new biomass boiler comes on stream in March 2009.

We then rolled out a model to measure the primary carbon footprint for our large sites across all divisions. A primary carbon footprint measures the carbon associated with production at a specific site. This is the most applicable measure for a business-to-business company, as the ingredients produced are then used in a wide range of other goods.

Our current primary carbon footprint across all major sites is 0.39 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of production. Because this is a relatively new area of analysis, it is difficult at this stage to benchmark our performance against others. However, we hope that by calculating our total carbon footprint, we will be much better able to manage our overall impact on the environment and can use it to benchmark our own performance year on year.

Calendar year 2007 results

We focus our measurement and our improvement efforts on the areas that have most environmental and financial impact. Compared with 2006 results:

■ Energy consumption reduced by 1.3%.

■ Water consumption increased by 3.8%.

■ Non-hazardous solid waste production increased by 9.7%.

Every 1% improvement in our energy index offers a cost saving estimated at £1.7 million. An equivalent improvement in the water index would save £100,000 and, in the non-hazardous solid waste index, £17,500.

This year we again did not achieve our Group target of an annual 3% reduction on a per unit basis in energy consumption, although as a result of our continuous investment programmes we were pleased to have achieved a slightly greater reduction than the previous year. However, we did not succeed in reducing Group water consumption or non-hazardous solid waste production, and therefore improvements to both these indices are important targets for 2008.

In January 2008, Tate & Lyle was one of 20 leading food and drink companies to agree to a UK industry-wide commitment to improve water efficiency and reduce water use. This agreement was jointly developed by the UK Food and Drink Federation and resource efficiency experts Envirowise.

Investing in renewable energy sources

Reducing energy consumption gets more difficult each year as we produce more value added products, which use more energy than producing our traditional products. Energy is a particular concern for us, because not only is it a big contributor to our overall carbon footprint, but it is also one of the most significant costs in our business.

To help reduce energy costs and to improve our environmental performance, we have developed proprietary technology to use renewable energy sources (biomass) in our plants. During the year, construction began on our £20 million project to build a biomass boiler at Thames Refinery, UK, which is on target to be completed by March 2009. This will supply 70% of the refinery's energy requirements. We are using similar technology at our new corn wet mill which is under construction at Fort Dodge, Iowa. We are also exploring the potential application of this technology at other plants around the world.