Environmental Sustainability Vision
At Flextronics, we are intently focused on protecting our employees, business partners, customers and communities from the many types of environmental risks associated with the work we do. Our innovative management practices and technologies help us maintain a safe and healthy workspace, protect the environment, conserve energy and natural resources, and prevent pollution and labor risks. By ensuring that our business processes address and enable environmental sustainability across the full life cycle, we’re able to provide value to our customers based on the environmental responsibilities we all share.
Flextronics is committed to our contemporary and scalable 5 x 5 Environmental Strategy, which consists of a five-pillar framework and a five-element value proposition:
Flextronics Sustainability Roadmap
Our roadmap to sustainability is based on three elements — foundation, growth and stewardship — all of which work in tandem to ensure that we are meeting our commitment to the environment. The foundation of the roadmap is a series of systems, processes, metrics and committees that create awareness and drive change across the entire company. Growth is based on successfully building competencies, integrating effective systems and processes and reinforcing a culture of change through self-governance and ownership. The real measure of success of our stewardship depends on establishing industry leadership and putting it towards business growth.
Environmental Management System
Flextronics is committed to an industry-leading and scalable Flextronics Environmental Management System (FEMS) that conforms to the ISO14001 framework and applies to all Flextronics entities. In addition to meeting the needs of all current environmental requirements, the system is capable of responding to emerging needs and challenges, as well as sharing best practices and minimizing costs.
By identifying critical metrics and putting measurement systems in place, FEMS is able to routinely provide evidence that Flextronics is fulfilling its environmental policies and commitments. Through management reviews that monitor performance and assign appropriate preventative actions, we’re able to assess and audit our processes and quickly integrate necessary changes into our business. Our ability to determine legal and customer requirements, as well as the risks and liabilities involved, allows us to create programs and manage them appropriately.
Environmental Metrics and Goals
Flextronics is currently implementing foundational structures for baselining and capturing environmental metrics in a consistent fashion from all global operations. We are tracking energy consumption and cost, solid and hazardous waste, water consumption and carbon emissions for Scopes 1 and 2. We are also developing a Scope 3 for implementation in 2012.
We have committed to a 15% CO2 per revenue dollar reduction by 2015 (2009 base year).
Design for Environment (DfE) Program
Flextronics’ DfE goal is to reduce environmental impacts throughout the full lifecycle of every product we develop and incorporate environmental solutions into the product design to mitigate compliance issues. We have robust specifications on banned and restricted materials. This involves avoiding the use of hazardous substances and endangered raw materials, always considering zero e-waste or 100% recyclable materials, using energy efficient and EPEAT capable products and designing our products to use energy and water efficient manufacturing processes. Reducing environmental impacts also factors into the decisions we make about suppliers, materials and our qualifications testing.
Manufacturing Focus
Our commitment to sustainability is also found in our manufacturing processes. We focus on lean concepts and competency building that result in environmentally compliant manufacturing processes. Our closed loop waste water treatment facilities monitor and reduce factory pollution around the world, building codes always meet LEEDS standards for new construction and we employ recycling programs with ethical scrap policies, both internally and within our aftermarket services.
Personal Behaviors
As employees of Flextronics, it is our personal responsibility to economize our energy and water usage and carbon emissions. We do this by commuting when possible, engaging in responsible business travel and recycling in both our business and personal lives.