Energy and Carbon Footprint

Reducing Our Environmental Footprint

Our primary product – metal packaging – embodies sustainability in its manufacture and its contributions to the circular economy. While effective management and conservation of resources have always been the bedrock of Crown’s operations, as our global footprint has grown and production volumes have increased, these principles have taken on new meaning.

In recognition of this, we established two ambitious sustainability goals in 2016, focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption by 2020. We are proud to report that we are making strong progress against these goals, particularly in the area of greenhouse gas emissions. In just three years, we have achieved 94% of our greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal – an incredible performance. Our next set of sustainability goals continues to prioritize these issues and focuses on several new areas.

We know that operating unsustainably is detrimental to long-term success and impacts profitability and our reputation with our key stakeholders. As such, we rely on an environmental management system to help us manage compliance, reduce costs and increase efficiencies.

Our Performance

The charts below detail our progress in primary environmental metrics for the metal and glass packaging that we manufacture. As stated elsewhere in this report, environmental data from our promotional packaging plants, CMB Engineering equipment and tooling division and Transit Packaging division is not included in these calculations. Additionally, since our reports focus on aspects of sustainability important to our core stakeholders, some previously reported data that primarily serves as a means to confirm regulatory compliance where we manufacture our products has not been included in this report. This data is reported directly to appropriate regulatory bodies to ensure compliance.

In this report, we have presented data from 2015 to 2018 to align with the reporting period for our 2020 Sustainability Goals. Visit our archived sustainability reports for data prior to 2015.

As done in our 2017 Sustainability Report, we have broken out data for the production of metal packaging and glass bottles as the manufacturing processes for these products are materially different. For example, we manufacture the glass used to produce glass bottles, but source the metal to make cans. This has a material effect on our Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions. Glass, which we currently manufacture only in Mexico, represents between 1% and 2% of total Company revenue.

Beverage Cans Reduce Carbon Emissions by 31% in a Decade

A recent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) completed by Metal Packaging Europe shows that the carbon footprint associated with the production of aluminum beverage cans has decreased by 31% over a 10-year span. The LCA focused on 25-, 33- and 50cl volumes and compared production data from 2016, the latest figures available, to that of 2006.

The impressive results can be attributed to the continuous improvements being made in the production of aluminum and the canmaking process, technology development and innovation enables overall lightweighting of beverage cans and an increasing recycling rate.