G4-1
Every day, millions of people rely on GOJO products to stay well in hospitals, schools, workplaces, public spaces and at home. Keeping skin and the surfaces people touch clean and free of illness-causing germs is of critical importance in our fast-paced, highly interactive world. Our products make a difference in the lives of people around the world, and we are committed to developing and producing them in ways that promote a healthy ecosystem.
Our GOJO Purpose, Saving Lives and Making Lives Better Through Well-Being Solutions, inspires us to continuously innovate to improve the lives of those we touch. We recognize the critical role of business in creating a healthy future and put great effort into understanding and proactively managing the social, environmental and economic impacts of our business on society and the environment. As a family enterprise with deep roots and great aspirations, we established our
2020 Sustainable Value Strategies and Goals to stretch ourselves and to drive innovative ways of working and developing products. This ambitious set of goals requires our team members to work together with our customers, partners, suppliers and our many other stakeholders to unearth insights and possibilities, and to uncover new ways for us to change how the world stays well.
We are making steady progress against the majority of our 2020 Sustainable Value Strategies and Goals, and 2017 was an exceptional year for advancing Sustainable Value innovation. Increasingly, customers are requesting products that address their unique challenges for the markets they operate within. In 2017, our focus on expanding the PURELL® Brand into multiple categories to solve important human problems around disease prevention led us to the launch of The PURELL SOLUTION ™, a complete set of soaps, hand sanitizers and surface disinfectants that more holistically fight the spread of illness-causing germs.
We are especially proud of and excited about the breakthrough innovation in dispensing and formulation technology within The PURELL SOLUTION™ portfolio. Our latest touch-free dispensing system, PURELL® ES8, is built for sustainable performance with its 68 percent reduction in battery waste and 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to leading touch-free systems on the market. These dispensers are designed for use with a broad portfolio of PURELL formulations including PURELL® Brand HEALTHY SOAP® with CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology. This patented breakthrough formulation sets a new standard for soap with 90 percent biobased content plus a faster and cleaner rinse, saving an estimated 6 gallons of water per refill compared to regular soap.
I am also particularly energized by two specific accomplishments in advancing Sustainable Ways of Working (SWOWSM) through increased engagement of a broad cross-section of GOJO team members and suppliers. During Earth Week 2018, we held a GOJO Sustainability Fair at each of our three Northeast Ohio facilities that covered seven shifts and engaged over 1,200 team members. The Sustainability Fair helped demonstrate to our team members how we are making progress against our 2020 Sustainable Value Strategies and Goals through tangible examples and interactive experiences. Building on the success of establishing a GOJO supplier scorecard, in 2017 we hosted the first annual GOJO Supplier Awards and recognized the GOJO supplier with the highest sustainability scorecard ranking with the first-ever GOJO Supplier Sustainability Award.
In 2017, we also pushed ourselves forward with operational improvements. Like many of our stakeholders, we are concerned about our changing climate and are striving to do our part by increasing the energy efficiency of our facilities and exploring alternative energy sources. We are thrilled to announce the installation of a 767 megawatt hours per year solar array to power our distribution operations. As a result, in 2018, two years before our goal deadline, we will achieve our Sustainable Value Goal to “power GOJO distribution operations by renewable energy.” To improve energy efficiency throughout our facilities in Northeast Ohio, we replaced traditional fluorescent lightbulbs and fixtures with light emitting diode (LED) bulbs and fixtures. More than 20,0000 fluorescent bulbs have been replaced with LED bulbs, saving nearly 200,000 kilowatt hours of energy each year.
As we work hard to advance our 2020 Sustainable Value Strategies and Goals, alongside our successes, we are also encountering challenges. These challenges serve as valuable learning opportunities as well as indicators that we have truly set stretch goals. For example, after establishing a program to recycle used dispensers, we found the economic model to be unsustainable for both our customer partners and us. While we are not deterred and will continue to explore workable options, to make nearer-term progress, we are reforecasting our 2020 Sustainable Value Goal on recovery of dispenser materials to instead eliminate waste from the dispenser installation process, which will contribute to the same ultimate end of reducing dispenser waste. I commend the team for its tenacious creativity in pursuit of Sustainable Value creation.