The Mosaic Company
Last month, The Mosaic Company, the world’s largest provider of phosphorus and potassium based fertilizer, released its 2014 Sustainability Report. Entitled “Leading with Purpose,” the report provides hard data to back up its corporate culture of leadership in environmental responsibility.
For eight years, we’ve worked with the Mosaic team and the reason that this report is important to highlight is that it shows how responsible corporate citizenship need not involve a trade-off between sustainability and improved production. Mosaic’s report shows with effective leadership, the two can go together.
It also is important to point out that, as is the case with many of our clients, Mosaic’s sustainability efforts have substantially improved the company’s ability to work with federal government agencies to achieve other important corporate goals.
The report summarizes Mosaic’s progress on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators, which govern activities such as freshwater use, energy use and greenhouse emissions. It also sets forth goals for the future, including:
Reduction of freshwater use by 10% per ton of product produced,
Reduction of energy consumption by 30 million gigajoules, and
Reduction greenhouse gas emissions by 10% per ton of product produced.
For the record, 30 million gigajoules works out to about 5 million barrels of oil.
Mosaic’s sustainability achievements have not gone unnoticed. The company presently is in its fifth consecutive year on the Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, and received a 99 out of 100 carbon disclosure score, with a grade of “A” for climate performance, in 2014.
Mosaic’s outgoing CEO Jim Prokopanko reflected the commitment of the company at the top leadership level to sustainability by saying that “no element of our company’s progress shines more brightly than our commitment to sustainability.” That theme was echoed by incoming CEO Joc O’Rourke, who indicated that “water, energy and emissions targets build on our existing business strategy, and position us to stretch our environmental responsibility efforts even further.”
Jon Deason, PhD Senior Advisor
A licensed professional engineer and member of the Dawson team since 1997, Jon was formerly Director of the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance at the Department of the Interior. For more about Jon, please click here.