Tag: 3BL

MilliporeSigma, the U.S. and Canada Life Science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, a leading science and technology company, today announced it placed No. 64 on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) National Top 100 List of the largest green power users within the EPA’s Green Power Partnership (GPP) program. MilliporeSigma is using more than 256 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually, which represents 101 percent of its U.S. operations’ total power needs. MilliporeSigma’s commitment to transition to use green power helps advance the voluntary market for green power, as well as the development of those sources.

“We take a multi-pronged approach to sustainability across our value chain to not only address our own emissions, but address our customers’ and shareholders’ expectations, and have started taking our suppliers along on this journey as well” says Chris Famolare, MilliporeSigma’s Global Head of Sustainable Operations. “We are honored and excited to be included in the EPA’s Top 100 List, 100% Green Power Users List, and Long-Term Contracts List as this is confirmation that we are causing a sizeable impact.”

According to the U.S. EPA, MilliporeSigma’s total U.S. electricity use is equivalent to the annual electricity use of more than 21,000 average American homes. In 2021, the company signed a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) delivering Renewable Energy Certificates that match 100% of its U.S. electricity consumption. The Azure Sky wind and storage project — one of the largest buyer-organized aggregation deals globally — went into operation in May 2022. In addition to the VPPA, previously purchased RECs and onsite generation brought MilliporeSigma to 100% renewable electricity in 2022.

Continuously improving the sustainability of its operations has been an ongoing focus of MilliporeSigma’s broader sustainability efforts, which also includes minimizing the environmental footprint of its products and packaging. In 2008, the company completed its first purchase of renewable energy certificates for the electricity used in four of its manufacturing facilities. In addition to several on-site solar installations, in 2015, MilliporeSigma advanced its renewable energy strategy with a state-of-the-art biomass central heat plant in Jaffrey, New Hampshire that avoids 400,000 gallons of fuel oil consumption each year. Most recently, the company added 2.25 MW of renewables to its property in Sheboygan, Wisconsin as part of a 30-year land lease agreement with We Energies’ SolarNOW program.

“This list of the largest users of green power across the nation is proof that good business practices can also benefit the environment,” said James Critchfield, Program Manager of EPA’s Green Power Partnership. “EPA applauds the leading organizations in the Green Power Partnership’s Top Partner Rankings for their notable commitment to expanding their use of green power and protecting the environment.”

MilliporeSigma has also been recognized for its sustainability leadership by the Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Awards in 2022, along with being a finalist for the Reuters Responsible Business Awards and a sustainability category standout for Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators. In addition, Chris Famolare was an honoree of the Environment + Energy Leader 50 last year.

To learn about how to become a sustainability multiplier, learn more at MilliporeSigma’s sustainability page.

As China’s largest restaurant company, Yum China is committed to offering delicious and nutritious food to its customers as well as promoting a balanced and healthy diet. Adopting the Chinese Dietary Guidelines (2022), which offer a series of dietary guidelines for Chinese residents, the company revised its Nutrition and Health Policy and issued its commitments to further drive the company’s nutrition and health endeavors.

The Nutrition and Health policy focuses on encouraging balanced diets through ongoing product innovation, providing a range of products to cater to difference preferences, promoting a healthy lifestyle and raising public awareness of nutrition and health, and supporting scientific research and improving innovation. A notable trend, responding to the increasing customer demand for plant-based products, has been the company’s launch of a range of plant-based foods and beverages across its brands, such as vegetarian meat-stuffed rice balls, natural fruit juice and pulp-based fruit teas, among other products.

Underpinning the company’s nutrition and health efforts are commitments to caring about the health of the next generation, the balanced diet of customers, and nutrition and health improvement. Meaningful progress towards these commitments has been made in recent years. In 2022, 100% of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell Kids Meals met the Chinese Nutrition Society’s (CNS) Nutrition Guidelines for Meals Offered by the Restaurant Industry to School-Age Children. In addition, 100% of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell Light Meals met the Guidelines for Design of Nutritional Light Meals issued by the China Cuisine Association (CCA), while all products are free of trans fat originating from hydrogenated/ partially hydrogenated oils. The company also has stated goals of 700+ tons of salt reduction in French fries, ketchup, and frozen cheese by 2030 from a 2020 base year, as well as 4,500+ tons of total sugar reduction by 2030 from a 2020 base year.

To learn more about Yum China’s ESG efforts, please visit its website: http://www.yumchina.com/respIndex

Last week, Katie Joyce, VP of Corporate Affairs, participated in a panel discussion at this year’s Women in Bio (WIB) Management Track event featuring women leaders in life science. This year’s event gave attendees the opportunity to connect with industry leaders and hear from a panel of executive women leaders discussing their career paths and individual experiences. To learn more about Women In Bio, visit their website: https://lnkd.in/ePbUHdj

PHILADELPHIA, April 24, 2023 /3BL Media/ – Aramark (NYSE: ARMK) the provider of food, facilities, and uniform services in 19 countries around the world, will celebrate its 10th annual global day of service, Aramark Building Community Day (ABC Day), on Thursday, April 27. ABC Day engages thousands of volunteers, from 13 countries, who dedicate their time, energy, and expertise to service projects in their local neighborhoods.

This ABC Day, Aramark volunteers will participate in projects benefiting 140 community organizations in 13 countries (United States, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, and the United Kingdom). Aramark provided grants to over 75 community service organizations for ABC Day, and will host “signature projects,” in Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver, and Toronto, Canada, which will engage 100+ volunteers.

“Aramark Building Community Day is such an exceptional day because it brings out the best in all of us,” said Jami Leveen, Vice President of Community Partnerships at Aramark. “This ABC Day is particularly special because it’s the culmination of 10 years of Aramark employees and leaders living our company’s mission of doing great things for each other, our partners, our communities, and our planet. Over the last decade, we have made significant contributions to our communities, enhanced the Aramark employee experience, and fostered a meaningful organizational culture of service, and I couldn’t be more proud.”

Aramark strives to enable a healthy and equitable society by offering skill development and educational opportunities to drive economic independence, increasing access to healthy food and nutrition education, and building vibrant communities by enhancing community environments and fostering connections. Every project happening on ABC Day will benefit the community in one of those ways. Some examples of projects occurring on ABC Day include:

Austin, Texas: Volunteers will create a community garden for seniors, providing a space to connect and share an enjoyable outdoor activity for many seasons to come.Belmont, Massachusetts: Volunteers will rebuild an accessible green community space by building new garden beds, creating shade structures and a children’s garden.Rome, Georgia and High Point, North Carolina: Volunteers will host field days to promote health and wellness with local school students.Greenville, South Carolina: A trip to the grocery store and a cooking demonstration will promote healthy eating to young adults facing mental health challenges.Lexington, Kentucky: Volunteers from Aramark Collegiate Hospitality will create health and wellness kits for multiple local nonprofits. Volunteers will also partner with the Arbor Day Foundation, for the third year in a row, to support tree planting.Rockville, Maryland: More than 100 volunteers will assemble comfort kits for foster children.Throughout the U.S.: Volunteers from Aramark’s employee resource groups (ERGs) will lead service projects benefiting diverse nonprofits.

International ABC Day projects will include:

Toronto, Canada: Volunteers will revitalize a multimedia room and teen center, plant community and micro gardens, and create multiple murals to enhance and transform family program rooms.Chile: Volunteers will host a career workshop, culinary demonstration, upcycling project, and transform several community spaces, including a community garden and primary school courtyard, and install solar lighting in three local neighborhoods.United Kingdom: Volunteers will create a teen center to provide a safe space for students to study, gather, and participate in after school activities.

Aramark’s commitment to people is a core part of the company’s environmental, social, and corporate governance platform, Be Well. Do Well., focused on positively impacting people and the planet. Aramark’s people priority is to facilitate access to opportunities that will improve the well-being of the company’s employees, consumers, communities, and people in its supply chain.

Since the first project in 2014, ABC Day has engaged nearly 55,000 Aramark employee volunteers and given back to almost 2 million community members. Over the years, volunteers have supported the communities where they live and work by hosting projects, planting community gardens, serving nearly 210,000 meals, and collecting more than 161,000 pounds of food.

About Aramark Building Community

Since its inception in 2008, Aramark Building Community, the company’s signature philanthropic and volunteer initiative, has invested tens of millions of dollars, engaged more than 70,000 employee volunteers, and impacted more than five million children and families in underserved communities around the world. Aramark fosters relationships with community organizations through transformational volunteer experiences that leverage its expertise to address social, economic, and environmental inequities. The company enables individual employees to become project leaders, collaborates with its ERGs to develop volunteer events, and provides opportunities for meaningful volunteer experiences throughout the year.

About Aramark

Aramark (NYSE: ARMK) proudly serves the world’s leading educational institutions, Fortune 500 companies, world champion sports teams, prominent healthcare providers, iconic destinations and cultural attractions, and numerous municipalities in 19 countries around the world with food, facilities, and uniform services. Because our culture is rooted in service, our employees strive to do great things for each other, our partners, our communities, and our planet. Aramark has been recognized on FORTUNE’s list of “World’s Most Admired Companies,” DiversityInc’s “Top 50 Companies for Diversity” and “Top Companies for Employee Resource Groups,” Newsweek’s list of “America’s Most Responsible Companies 2023,” the HRC’s “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality,” and scored 100% on the Disability Equality Index. Learn more at www.aramark.com and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Comcast NBCUniversal is excited to share that Mona Dexter has been named Vice President of Military & Veteran Affairs, succeeding Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Carol Eggert, who recently retired from Comcast. Mona will oversee our military hiring, inclusivity programs, and initiatives engaging military customers and communities. 

Mona joins Comcast from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Hiring Our Heroes, where she was the Chief of Staff and Vice President of the nation’s leading service member and military spouse workforce development program for the past five years. She also held several leadership positions in higher education and adult education programs, including with the Department of Labor, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the U.S. Army. Mona is the proud mother of a U.S. Army soldier and a military spouse for over 25 years.

Our Military Engagement initiatives reflect our company’s deep commitment to serving veterans, service members, and military families. Comcast NBCUniversal has hired nearly 21,000 veterans, National Guard and reserve service members, and military spouses since 2015. In 2022, Comcast NBCUniversal earned recognition as one of the nation’s leading military employers and military-friendly brands, including top rankings by Military Times, VETS Indexes, DiversityInc, and Military Friendly.   

These accomplishments are largely due to the incredible leadership of Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Carol Eggert over the past eight years. We are thankful for Carol’s three decades of military service and what she and the Military & Veterans Affairs team have done to connect our company to our military teammates, customers, and communities. We wish Carol a happy retirement and continued success serving others as a Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army and several higher education and nonprofit boards. 

We welcome Mona and wish her great success in her role, leading our commitment to serving the military community across Comcast NBCUniversal.

Each year, 660 million tons of construction waste goes to landfills or incinerators in the U.S. alone. Indeed, with each new data center, Meta sends tons of drywall debris to the trash since most local facilities do not have systems in place to recycle or recover drywall.

We wanted to do better so in 2022 we began working with Mycocycle, an innovative technology company in the zero-waste market, to pilot a new project at our data center in Gallatin, TN. The idea: train mushrooms to eat trash and turn drywall debris into a fully circular product that reduces waste and returns drywall to our data center buildings as newly manufactured building products.

Today our team is working closely with large building manufacturers to further test the approach and illustrate how Meta’s potential buying power can substantially influence the production of new sustainable building materials.

By prioritizing material circularity and zero waste this program aligns with Meta’s goal to reach net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030.

Cummins

Cummins’ most recent solar installation to go on-line has been honored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The 3.62 megawatt (MW) solar farm at Cummins’ Rocky Mount Engine Plant (RMEP) in North Carolina was recognized with a 2023 Better Project Award. The recognition highlights projects in the energy department’s Better Buildings/Better Plants initiative for accomplishments in implementing and promoting sustainable energy management. Cummins has been a part of the initiative since 2011.

“The Better Project awards highlight unique efforts to make meaningful headway in reducing energy, water, waste and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Carolyn Snyder, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency at the DOE.

The energy department’s Better Buildings/Better Plants program works with leading manufacturers to boost their competitiveness through improvements in energy efficiency and emissions reductions. More than 270 industrial companies representing nearly 14% of the U.S. manufacturing energy footprint partner with the DOE and commit to reducing their energy intensity, typically by 25% over 10 years across all their U.S. operations.

The solar installation at Rocky Mount went on-line in September of 2022. Located on 14 acres adjacent to the plant, it is capable of producing around 5.6 million kilowatt hours of energy annually, which goes to the manufacturing facility to reduce electricity purchased from the grid.

The renewable energy generated by the solar installation sequesters the carbon equivalent of 4,862 acres annually, roughly the space occupied by the Raleigh-Durham International Airport every year. A solar installation in Beijing, China, is the only solar array larger than Rocky Mount’s within Cummins.

Unique to RMEP, the project uses solar tracking panels that arc and track the sun as it rises and sets. This increases system efficiency without having to install more panels. The tracking panels were installed with ground mounts due to the project having available space and the ability to maximize system size for optimal exposure.

Cummins has been putting a major push on including solar in the company’s energy mix to help meet the goals in Cummins’ PLANET 2050 environmental sustainability strategy. The strategy includes the 2030 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from facilities and operations by 50% as well as the aspiration to achieve zero emissions in the company’s operations and products by 2050.

To date, Cummins has completed 65 solar array installations at 49 locations around the world, from Australia to North America. Thirty-nine of these projects have been completed since 2019, with 18 installations in India, where Cummins has its largest solar footprint.

During the 2021-2022 school years, students who took Fifth Third Bank Finance Academy® courses increased their knowledge about financial topics by 50%. On assessments taken before the courses, students scored an average of 57; post-course assessments saw those figures increase to 85 out of 100.

Some key statistics include:

Knowledge about financing higher education increased 54 points from 40 to 84.Insurance knowledge increased from 48 to 88.Income and employment awareness increased from 55 to 84.Consumer skills increased from 56 to 85.

“Before Finance Academy, I saw college as something difficult to pay for if not impossible as my family and I are immigrants in this country, but after receiving the knowledge of this program, I realized that there are many options to pay for college and become a successful individual,” said Stephanie Franchi, a Fifth Third Finance Academy student in Indiana.

Fifth Third Bank Finance Academy® is one of the Fifth Third Bank L.I.F.E. (Lives Improved through Financial Empowerment®) programs offered at no charge to people at every age and stage of life. Other signature programs include the Fifth Third Bank Young Bankers Club® and the Fifth Third Financial Empowerment Mobile, or eBus, a financial empowerment classroom on wheels, that takes financial access and resources directly into underserved communities.

By Mary Bruce Alford, Hope Credit Union 

When looking to meaningfully address the gender and racial wealth gap, investors should consider parking their funds at financial institutions like HOPE Credit Union (HOPE) that are in the communities where this work needs to happen. HOPE’s priorities and the reality of our borrowers have not changed over the last few years. We still need these deposits to fuel growth in deploying capital to disadvantaged communities.

If you’re a financial advisor and your clients would like to invest to close the equity gap for women and/or communities of color, have a deliberate conversation about what kinds of returns are reasonable from these investments to make progress. Some minority depository institutions have raised interest rates to follow market trends for CDs. For these institutions located in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles with greater population density, core deposits are more prevalent than in rural towns across the Deep South.

An analysis by McKinsey and Company found that closing the racial wealth gap would add between $1 to $1.5 trillion in economic activity over the next 10 years through job creation and income gains. By stopping to consider the full benefits of moving low-cost capital to depositories advancing access to capital for minority and women-owned businesses as well as access to homeownership to build wealth, investors can make a truly meaningful yet low-risk contribution towards making this vision a reality.

Read the complete article – https://greenmoney.com/three-ways-financial-advisors-can-advance-racial-and-gender-equity

=====

Sustainability at SAP became a long-term strategic goal in 2009. Ever since this commitment, SAP has prioritized a combination of economic performance, environmental protection, and social responsibility to make businesses sustainable. SAP is committed to achieving net zero along our value chain in line with a 1.5°C future in 2030 – 20 years earlier than the original target. To look to the future though, we must address sustainability today.

As world-class, sustainable programs, SAP events align to the dual goals of the sustainability strategy: for SAP to be both an exemplar and an enabler. First, SAP leads by example by integrating and continuously improving our operational sustainability. Then, we produce session content dedicated to innovative solutions that enable our customers and partners to accelerate their journeys to have greater positive economic, environmental, and social impact.

SAP Sapphire in 2023 will host customers, partners, and SAP experts to explore new ideas and the best solutions to future-proof businesses. This year’s SAP Sapphire will tour the world, stopping in Orlando (May 16–17), Barcelona (May 24–25), and Sao Paulo (June 1–2), as well as offer a free virtual event (May 16–17). This flagship event reflects the sustainability values outlined in SAP’s Global Environmental Policy and is built on a foundation of consistent, high-impact sustainable practices. Although each of our four venues is unique, our global community will come together at events that demonstrate the principles of reuse, reduce, and recycle:

Reuse

Focus on use of renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, hydraulic, biomass, tidal, geothermal, and biogas.Donate food surpluses to the community to help feed those in need and create compost.

Reduce

Replace single-use plastics with reusable, compostable, recyclable material.Exchange meat-heavy menus with locally sourced vegetarian and vegan options.

Recycle

Include clearly marked receptacles throughout venues.Partner with the Eden Reforestation Project.

The reality is that ‘future-proof’ is a way of operating. It’s built into how we do our business. SAP Sapphire is committed to practicing and promoting sustainable business now and for what’s next.

Join us online or in person this year and see for yourself – learn more about SAP Sapphire.