BENTON HARBOR—Whirlpool Corp. officials have released the company’s 2018 Corporate Sustainability Report, highlighting the company’s progress and accomplishments in the 2018 operational year, with particularly strong results in its efforts to reduce the amount of natural resources required in manufacturing its appliances.
Milestones and progress outlined in the 2018 Corporate Sustainability Report Summary include:
Sustainable Plants
- World Class Manufacturing: This program brings a strong focus to the environmental and energy usage in Whirlpool’s manufacturing plants. Through the program, the company addresses, prioritizes and tracks efficiency improvements, helping contribute to a greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 7 percent from 2017 to 2018 in Whirlpool plants. That is the equivalent of emissions from nearly 10,000 homes’ electricity use for one year.
- Zero Waste to Landfill: Throughout Whirlpool’s operations, progress has accelerated toward the goal of zero waste to landfill across the enterprise, with eight manufacturing plants achieving zero-waste status. In all, 2,128 tons of waste were diverted from landfills in 2018.
Sustainable Products
- Global Emissions Management System: To improve transparency about product emissions, Whirlpool has developed a new global emissions management system. The system determines a global footprint for the company’s products, unifying more than 12 systems into one global reporting capability. This system will track data from a baseline year of 2016, greatly improving the ability to act strategically to lower the footprint of the company’s product portfolio. The significantly improved system will lead to the potential for improved science-based goal setting in 2019.
- Resource Efficiency: Whirlpool’s emphasis on resource efficiency has led the company to develop design-for-environment tools to deliver more sustainable products that use more recycled content. These capabilities will help fulfill the commitment to use 100 percent recycled content on major plastic components in Whirlpool-made European products by 2025, as well as to use a majority of recycled-content steel.
Sustainable Practices
- Water Reduction: Whirlpool’s collective work, improved processes, and technology have resulted in a reduction in water consumption of nearly 10 percent from 2017 to 2018 in the company’s manufacturing plants. That’s enough to run 56 million dishwasher loads, 14 million loads of laundry, or fill 240 Olympic swimming pools.
- Investing in Communities: For two decades, Whirlpool has partnered with Habitat for Humanity, with total cash and in-kind donations totaling more than $107 million and over 197,300 ranges and refrigerators to new Habitat homes in the U.S. and Canada.
- Volunteerism: In 2018, Whirlpool employees contributed 268,000 volunteer hours.
For more information on Whirlpool’s public sustainability commitments, priorities and progress, visit: http://assets.whirlpoolcorp.com/files/Whirlpool-Corporation-2018-Sustainability-Report.pdf