P&G 2008 Sustainability Report - Leadership Statement: Responsibility

Innovating sustainably: Where responsibility meets opportunity

Last year, P&G established five strategies to improve the environmental profile of the Company’s products and operations and to expand our Live, Learn and Thrive social responsibility program. A year into this renewed commitment, we’re on track to meet or exceed our goals, and to integrate sustainability into P&G’s day-to-day business.

1. Products. We want to delight consumers with sustainable innovations that improve the environmental profile of our products. Our goal is $20 billion in cumulative sales of these products over five years. We generated more than $2 billion in sales in our first year by launching seven sustainable innovations in fiscal 2008, including the compaction of liquid laundry detergents—an innovation we rolled out across P&G’s line of North America laundry brands. We are confident we can meet this 2012 goal based on our current plans and pipeline.

2. Operations. We want to improve the environmental profile of P&G’s operations worldwide. Our goal is to deliver an additional 10% reduction (per unit of production) in energy and water use, CO₂ emissions, and waste disposal by 2012, which will complete a decade-long reduction of at least 40% in these areas. We’re making significant progress against this goal. For example, we’re building sustainability-inspired manufacturing sites in North America, Europe, and China. We’re also improving existing facilities, such as our manufacturing plant in Mehoopany, Pennsylvania, where a heat recovery system is now reclaiming enough energy to power almost 12,000 U.S. households annually. Company-wide, we’ve reduced energy by 6%, reduced CO₂ emissions by 8%, reduced waste disposal by 21%, and reduced water usage by 7% this past year.

3. Social Responsibility. We want to improve lives through P&G’s global social responsibility program, Live, Learn and Thrive. This year we opened our 140th P&G Hope School in China, helping children in poverty-stricken rural areas gain access to elementary education. We also delivered our one-billionth liter of clean drinking water through our Children’s Safe Drinking Water program, leveraging PUR sachets. Additionally, Pampers partnered with UNICEF to provide funds for more than 50 million doses of vaccine to help prevent maternal and neonatal tetanus in the developing world. Dozens of Live, Learn and Thrive programs like these enabled P&G to reach more than 60 million children globally this year.

4. Employees. We want to engage and equip every P&G employee to build sustainability thinking and practices into their everyday work. We’ve challenged one another to “Take the ‘R’ (Responsibility) for Tomorrow,” a unified employee program that is combining and expanding successful pilot projects from around the world. We celebrated Earth Day and World Water Day at dozens of P&G locations globally. We launched a Sustainability Ambassador Network for P&Gers who want to be more active as sustainability leaders. We’ve helped reduce travel by investing in state-of-the-art video collaboration studios.

5. Stakeholders. We want to help shape the future—now and for generations to come—by collaborating with local, regional, and global stakeholders. For example, we’re an active part of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and have stepped up our social responsibility commitments in each of the three years we’ve partnered with CGI, to help millions of children globally Live, Learn and Thrive. In the UK, we have worked with WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) to deliver innovation that enables packaging reductions without compromising packaging integrity. And we’re working with the Energy Saving Trust in Europe to encourage people to wash clothes in colder temperatures. We firmly believe we can make a bigger difference together with partners like these than any of us can make on our own.

Throughout P&G’s history, we’ve focused on doing what’s right and our approach to sustainability is fully consistent with this basic Company principle. We are accountable for delivering our goals year to year, and committed to improving P&G’s sustainability results consistently and reliably over the long term. To learn more, please see our online report, prepared using the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) G3 Guidelines, at www.pg.com/sustainability.