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Dale Farm – Scoring High in Environmental ‘Arena’
Dale Farm has achieved ‘Quintile One’ status in NI’s most influential environmental benchmarking survey, emerging as the top-scoring food processing company.
The annual NI Environmental Benchmarking Survey carried out by the Arena Network, Business in the Community’s environmental arm, is recognised as the principal measure of environmental engagement here. Targeting some 250 of NI’s largest public and private sector organisations across 15 different industry sectors, the Survey scores participants on three main environmental areas – ‘management’, ‘performance’ and ‘assurance’.
Significantly, a core emphasis is placed on reducing the gap between management processes and actual performance – in other words, requiring companies to ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talk the talk’. Dale Farm demonstrated strength in both in its systems and positive implementation.
Mike Mullan, Dale Farm Group HR and Business Improvement Director, says that the company is working pro-actively to adopt best practice to minimise the environmental footprint of its activities.
“As one of NI’s largest food processing businesses, environmental performance is, in fact, a key competitive issue for the business. By developing sustainable practices, we are not only improving our compliance but are also reducing costs, improving competitiveness and increasing consumer and customer appeal.”
“Our improvement plan focuses on six key areas – energy, water, waste, effluent, packaging and chemicals, and core initiatives include waste prevention, recycling and reduction, energy saving projects, and establishing comprehensive management and compliance systems.
“Our investment and focus are paying off. Recent achievements include reducing our overall NI energy consumption by 8% in the last year, increasing our recycling rates from 11% to 40% in the last three years, and reducing water consumption at our Pennybridge dairy in Ballymena by 15%. It’s very encouraging to see these achievements benchmarked so strongly in the important Arena Network Survey,” he concluded.
For further information please contact Dana McCusker / Kelly McKee at Morrow Communications. Tel: 028 9039 3837.
