 |
 |
|
When we set an example through our ethical, responsible
and sustainable conduct as a business, our consumers make
a stronger connection with our brands.
We're committed to ethical, responsible and sustainable conduct
across the entire business and have realised that with the launch
of PlanetBrands, our business strategy for sustainable growth.
PlanetBrands is a five-year plan which touches every part of
our business and encourages our stakeholders to contribute
to our vision of a more sustainable future.
By 2013, we want to have made a significant contribution
to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, zero trade waste
to landfill and to have significantly reduced our energy and
water consumption.
PlanetBrands touches four areas where we want to make
a difference: our people, our marketplace, our community
and our environment.
|
| |
|
| |
| |
 |
|
Corporate responsibility in the workplace begins by providing safe,
equitable and supportive working conditions.
Creating a responsible working environment, where people are
valued and respected, leads to improved productivity, profitability,
reputation and ultimately greater value to our customers, consumers
and shareholders.
We've instituted a number of health and wellbeing programs
to ensure that our people remain safe and healthy, including:
- Brandssafe - our workplace Integrated Management System
encompassing safety (AS/NZS:4801), quality (ISO:9001) and
environment (ISO:14001). Brandssafe covers areas such as leadership,
process approach and continual improvement. Pacific Brands
is externally accredited to all three systems;
- Online services delivering health assessments, lifestyle plans,
healthy recipes and a library of health and fitness information;
- Annual influenza vaccination program; and
- Discounted private hospital, health and wellbeing insurance
and gym memberships
Our behaviour can set an example for our suppliers and
their employees. Our supplier evaluation processes require our
suppliers to show they have formal management systems in place
to identify and manage safety, health, environment and quality
(SHEQ) aspects, a history of SHEQ compliance and evidence of
how they manage the SHEQ performance of their subcontractors.
CASE STUDY
PACIFIC BRANDS JOINS ETHICAL TRADING INITIATIVE (ETI)
The Ethical Trading Initiative is an alliance of companies, trade
union organisations and non-government organisations committed
to working together to identify and promote good practice in
implementing labour practice codes.
Pacific Brands is the first Australian company to join the ETI
to promote and enhance our social compliance program.
It gives us the opportunity to make sure we're a world's bestpractice
company when it comes to looking after our employees
and partners.
ETI members believe that this collaborative approach provides
the opportunity for making significant progress in promoting
the observance of internationally recognised labour standards
throughout global supply chains.
While we have a strong commitment to social compliance,
we recognise the difficulties in dealing with a large and complex
supply chain. However, a targeted focus on continual improvement
in this area will result in lifting the standards of our suppliers.
|
| |
| Back to top |
| |
 |
|
Many consumers now look beyond the actual product they're
buying to ask serious questions about how that product was made.
Our consumers want to make sure the product was produced
using ethical manufacturing, with minimal environmental impact.
And if they can't be sure, that will influence their buying decision.
We aim to foster partnerships that are mutually beneficial by being
innovative, transparent and fair in all our dealings with our suppliers,
retail partners and consumers.
Suppliers can also have a significant social and environmental
impact on a company's performance and reputation.
We want to work with our consumers and our supply chain,
to deliver the best products to meet our customers' needs
while providing good social and environmental outcomes for
all our stakeholders.
|
| |
| Back to top |
| |
| |
 |
|
Looking after the community our employees and consumers live
in helps us build deeper connections with them.
To enhance the economic and social wellbeing of our communities,
we develop innovative programs and partnerships.
Our community investment strategy aims to enhance the social and
economic wellbeing of the communities where we live and work.
The heart of our approach involves developing innovative programs
and partnerships with clear aims and meaningful outcomes.
Our community investment program, Brands for Good, continues
to support our six national, not-for-profit community partners in the
areas of cancer awareness and children, youth and families at risk:
- Breast Cancer Network of Australia (BCNA)
- Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA)
- Camp Quality
- Lifeline Australia
- The Brotherhood of St Laurence
- Reconciliation Australia
We have increased our support of BCNA by forming a three-year
partnership that will assist in funding key activities and a number
of strategies in support of women diagnosed with breast cancer.
Our relationship with BCNA began in 2005, via the My Care Kit
which sees women newly diagnosed with breast cancer given
kits containing a Berlei soft-cup bra, breast forms and a carry bag
to help them through the months after surgery. The My Care Kit
program now provides more than 130 kits to women each week.
Our sponsorship of PCFA has also grown. We're a Platinum sponsor
of the organisation and will continue to support the 2008 National
Men's Health Promotion Forums which assist in raising awareness
and early detection of prostate cancer. As the company which sells
more men's underwear in Australia than any other, we know the
importance of helping men understand and combat prostate cancer.
Pacific Brands also donates stock from our businesses to help
our charity partners - last year we donated $500,000 worth of
in-kind stock to Lifeline and Brotherhood of St Laurence stores
to help those less fortunate.
Many of our businesses support a wide range of local community
groups, schools, charities and voluntary organisations by providing
financial support and in-kind donations. We encourage every one
of our employees to be active in fundraising and volunteering
initiatives in the community.
Our Brands for Good programme continues to use the London
Benchmarking Model, an internationally recognised framework
for measuring and reporting corporate community contributions.
|
| |
| Back to top |
| |
 |
|
Any business makes an impact on the environment, but we believe
that minimising our environmental footprint delivers benefits not
only to our company and our employees, but to our customers
and the broader community as well.
We're continually improving our environmental impact, with an
environmental management system to measure how we affect
the community through:
- Paper and packaging;
- Greenhouse emissions;
- Waste production and recycling;
- Energy use;
- Water use; and
- Transport.
We try to reduce our environmental impact by:
- Supporting the National Packaging Covenant (NPC) and its
commitment to managing the environmental impact of consumer
packaging in Australia. Our packaging materials are either reused
or recycled and new opportunities are being explored across
Pacific Brands on an ongoing basis;
- Subscribing to Greenfleet and supporting its tree-planting
programme to neutralise greenhouse emissions from all
our corporate vehicles. We have 1,000 cars registered
with the programme;
- Recycling as much as possible through our partners SITA
Environmental Services and Visy Recycling to achieve our target
of zero percent waste to landfill;
- Auditing of the energy and lighting we use in all our operations
to identify where we can do better;
- Setting printers to double-sided printing, which has reduced
the amount of paper we use for printing;
- Using water-saving programmes at our manufacturing sites; and
- Insisting on all employees using a Toyota Prius hybrid car when
they require a hire car.
CASE STUDY
WATER
Many of our businesses use a significant amount of water
in their manufacturing operations. Three of these sites now
have water-saving initiatives in place that reuse water previously
discarded as part of the process.
In May 2008, Pacific Brands Hosiery Group in Coolaroo,
Victoria installed a water-recycling plant that reuses the water
used in the hosiery dyeing process.
Using reverse-osmosis technology - a fine filtering technique -
water from the rinse cycles is directed through a series of filters
where it is purified and reused in the next batch to be dyed.
The plant now saves almost 125,000 litres of water per day,
halving its water use. This is the first time reverse-osmosis
technology has been used in an Australian textile industry
dyehouse on this scale.
Holeproof in Nunawading, Victoria and Bonds in Wentworthville,
New South Wales also have water reuse programs, where water
used to wash pre-dyed yarn is reused in the dyeing process.
These programmes have seen the sites save 27,500 litres and
120,000 litres of water a day respectively. More conversions of
dyeing machines to use water saving techniques are planned
in the coming months.
We'll continue to look for new ways we can decrease our
water use without compromising the quality of our products.
|
| |
| Back to top |
| |
|
 |
