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Channel: Anvil Knitwear's CSR Report » Water
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Management Approach

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From developing new eco-products that support environmentally sustainable manufacturing to educating people inside and outside of Anvil about making environmentally responsible choices to our constant efforts to make our production processes more energy efficient, we are deeply committed to minimizing our impact on the environment and to conducting business in a way that has a positive impact on the world and around us.

In the last three years, we have worked hard to reduce our organizational carbon footprint, and to continually monitor our ecologic footprint.  While we failed to meet our emissions reduction goal in 2010, we continue to be committed to continual improvement and have set reset some of our goals to address overall.

Our approach to environmental responsibility was enhanced in 2007, when we formally adopted a set of environmental principles that today guides the decisions we make, and shapes how we behave as a company, as employees, as partners to our stakeholders and as global citizens. These principles guide how we create all of our products.

At about the same time, we began introducing environmentally friendly fibers into our product line, from organic and recycled cotton to polyester made from recycled plastic bottles. The success of the eco-products made from these fibers has been tremendous, and our innovation and expertise in this area, coupled with our staunch commitment to a fiber’s authenticity, has allowed us to meaningfully distinguish our brand. We are committed to continuing to add eco-fibers, and have made a commitment to introducing at least one new eco-product every year. We began working closely with American organic cotton farmers and then financially supporting conventional farmers looking to transition to organic methods. We did this in part to ensure that the supply of US grown organic cotton continues to increase, but also because the organic methods support a balanced eco-system and biodiversity.  Most of our products (70 styles in all), however, are still made from conventional cotton and we strive to make sure that our manufacturing processes are mindful of the ecological impact we have on the environment.

Our strategy is to work with our supplier and treat them as long term partners, looking beyond the single Purchase Order to:

  • Share relevant business information
  • Build long-term relationships
  • Encourage and reward sustainability, transparency and data
  • Take into account how our respective business practices may impact the others business
  • Collaborate to develop solutions to the ultimate customers

But it’s not only our products and materials where we know we can make a difference. It’s also in how we do what we do everyday. In this respect, we needed to begin by better understanding how we use energy, and that started with us taking a hard look at ourselves. We do this each year with our Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Organizational Assessment (in layman’s terms: a soup-to-nuts accounting of all the energy and natural resources we consume during the course of our daily operations.) The study was critical to helping us identify how we could continue to improve our efforts to conserve energy. You can read more about the results of the organizational assessment in our response to EN16.

In order to achieve this, we instituted various initiatives, none more critical than the Environmental Task Forces we created at each of our facilities. The groups are tasked with finding new ways to reduce the amount of water, electricity, fuel and heat we use, and with keeping track of how we’re performing against our goal to reduce our overall use of energy. With their help, and with the help of our industrial engineers, we found ways to reduce our dependence on oil and use more recycled heat or energy from renewable sources, such as biomass, a refined fuel made from biodegradable matter.

With all that we’ve accomplished, we recognize there is so much more left. One of the most challenging areas for us continues to be finding ways to reduce our use of water. The change in our product mix to more dyed t-shirts over white bleached shirts continues and we believe this change in our product mix will be permanent, so our challenge continues to be to find more ways to continue reducing water usage and making the textile manufacturing process more efficient.   That’s why we worked with PE International in 2011 to develop a product water footprint baseline for our basic Anvil(r) t-shirt in both bleached and dyed styles, which will be published in this 2011 CSR Progress Report.

The challenge of internally reporting ROIs for everything we do has improved and has shown significant savings throughout the organization.

And lastly, what continues to be our biggest challenge is making our environmental agenda a priority for every employee, at every level, and every day. We need to continue to engage employees, from those who are managers to those who are at entry level, and let them know every choice they make during the course of their day, the small ones and the big ones, can make a huge difference to our overall performance, and a huge difference to the environment. And, we have done so under the AnvilSustainableManufacturing (ASM) initiative but this is a large and ongoing project for us.

Please read our responses to the Performance Indicator questions for more detail about what we accomplished thus far and where we believe we need to improve in the future.



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