Doing the Right Thing

Dow Chemical Company CIO Dave Kepler is not only responsible for Dow's Shared Services and Information Technology departments, but is also very involved in Dow's 2015 Sustainability Goals. Kepler told US CIO magazine recently of his belief that sustainability is about the world and Dow's contribution to some of its challenges. Ten years ago the company set environmental and safety goals around things like injury and illness, process safety and chemical emissions, he said, and progress to data has been significant. "One of our goals was to reduce our energy consumption by 20 percent, and we reduced it by 22 percent. We also achieved an 84 percent reduction in emissions.

"We expanded beyond those initial goals recently with Dow's 2015 Sustainability Goals. We intend to improve our environmental health and safety performance by 75 percent within the next eight years. IT touches on almost every one of our goals. For example, IT is charged with creating databases to track environmental activity — measuring our emissions, tracking the safety and performance of our carriers, and managing our contractors. IT not only manages the information but it serves as a watchdog."

Dow has such stringent process control automation at its plants that they will shut a plant down automatically if it is not compliant with air and water emissions requirements. IT also helps provide safety assessments for all of Dow's products. Ultimately the company plans to provide stakeholders with key information related to the safety and risk of every chemical from Dow, via an integrated database that tracks consumption, usage and loss of a given base material.

And in the US, after Fairmont Hotels & Resorts' move to power all its check-in computers with wind power proved so successful last year, it is now expanding the initiative to include all computers in its corporate office. The organization claims last year's purchase of Eco-Logo certified wind power for 249 check-in computers will result in a greenhouse gas reduction of almost 100 tonnes over the next year.

The first step to reducing your environmental footprint is to measure it. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) aims to make reporting on economic, environmental and social performance — sustainability reporting — by all organizations as routine and straightforward as financial reporting.