Energy, Water and Climate Change

Foster’s Environment Policy

In 2009, Foster’s Group Executive adopted an updated Global Environment Policy. The policy formalises our commitment to understanding and minimising any adverse impacts our operations and our products have on the environment.

We will work towards our objective by:

meeting or exceeding all environmental regulations in each of our workplaces,
maintaining a structured and consistent environmental management system, driving continuous improvement throughout our operations and effectively addressing hazards, risks and emerging issues,
driving the integration of environmental considerations into key elements of core business processes through innovation, clear objectives and engagement,
ensuring that all employees, contractors and visitors understand and comply with our environment policies, procedures and practices,
ensuring that consumption of resources, such as water, energy, packaging, chemicals and raw materials is reduced, or is as efficient as possible,
minimising wastes generated, and maximising diversion from landfill for waste materials, through recycling or re-use, from within our operations and across our customer and consumer base,
protecting, enhancing and where possible, restoring biodiversity,
working across our supply chain to deliver commercially sound improvements in environmental performance.

Managing, monitoring and reporting Foster’s environmental performance

A comprehensive environmental monitoring system underpins our transparent reporting, incorporating environmental metrics common across the beer and wine businesses globally. The database allows us to report energy and water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and waste generation at a global and site level, as an absolute figure or per unit of production.

Climate change

We acknowledge the significant challenge posed by climate change and the action required to avoid increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.

As an organisation we recognise the importance of our responsibilities in reducing our carbon footprint and looking for opportunities to achieve responsible carbon management across our supply chain.

We also recognise that climate change presents a number of risks to our business, particularly those relating to regulatory changes and the impact of changing climatic conditions on our vineyards. We have adopted appropriate management systems, strategies and processes to adapt to these existing and emerging issues. Our environmental program of works aligns environmental initiatives and activities occurring within our business against our environmental priorities and objectives stated in our Environment Policy.

Foster's participates in the annual Carbon Disclosure Project. Carbon Disclosure Project is an independent not-for-profit organisation which holds the largest database of corporate climate change information in the world.

Energy & Water Efficiency

A dedicated Energy and Water Efficiency Project Team works to improve our company wide performance on energy, water and waste management.

In addition to building capacity and driving cost savings at our beer and wine production sites, it enables us to meet the relevant legislative requirements for energy, water and waste management that exist within Australia.

In particular, we have integrated the requirements of the Australian Federal Government’s Energy Efficiency opportunity Act (2006) and rolled the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Assessment into this program.

TARGET:
Achieve a 10% reduction in water use per unit of production by 2011 on 2007 levels.

TARGET:
Achieve a 10% reduction in energy use per unit of production by 2011 on 2007 levels.

Vineyard sustainability

Foster’s is a leader in the wine industry in monitoring and analysing climate related viticulture data. Harvest conditions and timing, regional and varietal variations are all collected and analysed, informing viticulture planning and regional supply contracts.

We maintain a number of tools to achieve this. Foster’s Footprint Program focuses on the sustainable future of the vineyard. Foster’s Footprint contains a series of tools and best practice guidelines developed for use by our vineyards to assist with actively managing the risks and opportunities on water use and quality, agrochemical use, fuel storage and handling, biodiversity, soil health, waste and carbon emissions.

Sustainable Choice advises sites on the selection of chemicals that have least impact on people and the environment. The tool incorporates a scoring system and vineyards are measured on the “softness” of their agrochemical spray programs.

Green Business Program is actively supported by our vineyards in the Napa and Sonoma regions in the Americas. The program focuses on businesses achieving environmental compliance, conserving resources, preventing pollution and minimising waste. Our Asti and Chateau St Jean wineries are certified to the Sonoma County Green Business Program. Our Beringer and Etude wineries are certified to the Napa County Green Business Program.

**Solar panels generating electricity at Foster's Asti Winery & Stags' Leap Winery in Napa, California

Biodiversity

Many of Foster’s sites have biodiversity value that we wish to protect, enhance and restore. This encourages the retention of native flora and protection of native fauna habitats.

Our commitment to managing biodiversity can be found within the Foster’s Biodiversity Guidelines, which were developed together with the Australian Conservation Foundation. These guidelines set out our high level commitment to biodiversity and provide detailed actions for managing the impacts of our operations on biodiversity, particularly within our wine business.