2020 Sustainability Report

Why Water Matters

As a global manufacturing company, Greif has a responsibility to minimize our water use and improve water quality, particularly in our most water intensive operations. Responsible water management reduces our demand for water as water scarcity and water costs are rising and ensures that water discharge from our facilities is treated and safe to protect the health of the communities in which we operate. Our water management practices simultaneously achieve these aims while creating operational efficiencies and minimizing regulatory risk.

Governance

Greif’s Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Policy provides global guidelines for water conservation to improve water efficiencies in existing operations and incorporate water management in planning for future projects and technology investments. Each Greif facility is expected to manage water locally in accordance with our EHS policy with supervision and support from Greif’s EHS team regarding compliance obligations and best practices for water use, treatment, and recycling. Local management teams are encouraged to improve water efficiencies and quality, reduce water withdrawal to minimize impact to local sources, maintain regulatory compliance and reduce costs related to water.

95 percent of Greif’s water use impact occurs in our 13 paperboard mills within our Paper Packaging and Services (PPS) business. Our water management efforts primarily focus on these mills. In 2020, we continued our efforts to eliminate direct discharge from our mills by converting our Baltimore, Ohio mill to discharging to a local municipal water treatment plant. In addition to removing direct discharge from our operations, this transition reduces Greif’s overall water withdrawal by 400,000 gallons a day. Many of these mills draw on well water from local aquifers, which in turn are discharged into different bodies of water post-use after treatment. We have also continued to implement projects to reduce water use in our mills. For example, at our mill in Los Angeles we replaced nine water oscillators with electromechanical oscillators which reduced well water intake by 2.1 million gallons per year, a 4 percent reduction, in addition to reducing our costs.

Greif monitors Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure proper treatment of our wastewater. If a treatment incident occurs, the facility manager would observe a change to these KPIs, which initiates an investigation to determine the root cause and resolve the problem. When necessary, Greif engages third-party experts to support our investigations. For example, in 2020 Greif’s Tama mill experienced high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and nitrogen concentrations. Greif contracted with a third party to conduct a site inspection and recommend corrective actions. Based on their recommendations, we increased nutrient addition, instituted improved analytical testing to monitor nutrient levels and introduced chemical oxygen demand (COD) testing to receive faster feedback on potential issues.

While Greif’s water impact is predominately in our PPS operations, we take steps to curb water use across all our operations, particularly in water-stressed regions in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. In these facilities, and across all our operations, we reduce water pressure where it is higher than needed, replace leaky valves and collect and use rainwater when possible. Our Global Industrial Packaging facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia implemented many such measures in an effort to reduce and recycle their wastewater, ultimately resulting in a 32 percent reduction in waste to landfill from their facility. Please see our Waste page for more information on their achievement.

In 2021, we will develop standard environmental data dashboards across our mills to better understand and manage water and effluent, as well as energy data, and continue working to identify water efficiency opportunities.

Goals & Progress

In 2017, Greif announced a 2020 goal of 10 percent reduction in kilograms of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) per metric ton of production, from a 2014 baseline of 1.47, at legacy Greif mills. Our 2017 materiality process led to the creation of new 2025 goals and restating our BOD goal as a 2025 goal. Additionally, in 2021, we plan to create 2030 goals and targets in line with the American Forest and Paper Association.

In 2018, we reevaluated our historical water use and BOD data to confirm our baseline and assumptions to support continual improvement related to water. Through this process, we restated our 2014 BOD baseline to 1.40.

2025 Goal: Reduce BOD discharged in kilograms by 10 percent per metric ton of combined production from the Riverville and Massillon mills using the 2014 restated baseline by the end of fiscal year 2025.

Progress: Since 2017, we have reduced BOD per metric ton of production by 71.8 percent in our legacy Greif containerboard mills. Our significant progress against our BOD goal was enabled by the installation of a wastewater treatment facility at our Massillon mill. Completed in July 2017, the project led to modest improvements in 2017 and far surpassed expectations in 2018. These benefits continued to be realized in 2020.

In 2021, we will continue to track our progress in reducing BOD while controlling specific water use in our mills and reevaluate our goals to include both our legacy Greif mills and Caraustar mills that are now part of our organization. Additionally, in 2021, we will announce new water reduction targets for our mills.

Performance Data

WATER*