Our Environment
We have a moral duty to conserve and enhance our local environment
Our Environment
We are dependent on the natural world to run our businesses. From water and power generation to the natural ingredients that inspire our flavors, it is in our interests to protect and preserve the natural world.
Our key environmental impacts are energy, water and waste. We closely manage our use of energy and the resultant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; we monitor our water use and effluent discharges; and we aim to minimise the creation of waste.
The first step is to understand our environmental footprint. Our main environmental impacts are energy, water and waste so we closely monitor GHG emissions, water use, effluent discharge and waste outputs.
We have ten manufacturing sites around the world: our dairy and nutrition lines are produced in our Ballineen factory in Ireland, and our flavours, extracts and essences are produced at our Synergy sites in the US, Europe and Asia.
Conserving Water
Water is essential to production. We measure every drop we use to ensure it is used efficiently and appropriately. Each of our manufacturing plants maps their water usage and recover this precious resource where possible.
Our facility at Hamilton, Ohio developed a water reclamation project in 2020 from Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology. The new process reduces cycle time, enabling the production team to be more efficient, conserving 4.3 million litres of water a year as well as reducing energy use and waste.
We plan to continue investing in reverse osmosis and other technologies to further reduce our water usage.
Decarbonising Our Energy
We aim to be carbon neutral by 2035 across all of our sites through decarbonising our existing energy sources.
Climate change is a material issue for Carbery Group, and we are active supporters of both the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to less than 2°C on pre-industrial levels. We believe it will take collective action to make this possible, and through our sustainability strategy, we plan to make an active contribution.
Waste Management
Our ambition is to be a zero-waste company across all our global sites by improving the segregation of waste streams and the use of recycling, composting and anaerobic digestion.
Across the Group, the majority of our wastes are recycled or reused as organic fertiliser or compost rather than sent to landfill.
We are always looking for opportunities to embrace the circular economy by finding uses for the co-products generated at our sites.
Bio-composting in Ohio
Coffee is a key ingredient in our Synergy Flavors site in Hamilton, Ohio, generating around 20 tons of solid waste every day. We take this waste to a compost farm to biodegrade.
After six months, the nitrogen rich material can be added to soil as a completely natural organic fertilizer.
In 2020, we more than doubled the amount of organic fertilizer produced from waste coffee beans at the Hamilton site, which, together with the nutrient-rich organic fertilizer produced at Ballineen, provided farmers with 20,000 tonnes of organic fertilizer last year, enriching their soils, displacing synthetic alternatives and offsetting significant carbon emissions.
Synergy HQ – Wauconda, Illinois
In 2019, we added 38,000 square feet of new office space at our Synergy US headquarters in Wauconda, Illinois.
To minimize the impact on the environment, we designed the offices according to the principles of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building certification program.
Built using recycled, renewable, and low emitting materials, the offices are powered by solar panels and high efficiency boilers to reduce their carbon footprint.
There are bike racks and dedicated parking spaces for more fuel-efficient vehicles while inside, the building benefits from demand control ventilation and a highly efficient Variable Air Volume cooling system, auto-control metering taps and flush valves.
The project won ‘Development of the Year’ at the 2019 Lake County district Stormwater Awards, with the judges impressed by the implementation of bioswales and the sustainable landscaping, which was designed with native prairie style species that require less irrigation while still creating a lush natural setting for workers and wildlife to enjoy.
Synergy Flavors Green Team
Many of our employees are passionate about sustainability so we invited them to form site-based Green Teams bring local sustainability programs to life. We encourage and empower our people to implement change to improve our environmental footprint.