Yum! Environment
We care about the impact of our global environmental footprint and we believe it is our responsibility to understand and minimize the impacts of our business on the environment.
Our Challenges Include:
- Energy usage in our restaurants
- Waste management
- Packaging
- Sustainable building design
We are proactively exploring the ways in which we can reduce our impact on the environment without compromising operational standards or shareholder value. Over the past two years, our U.S. company-owned restaurants aggressively worked to reduce our energy consumption. We achieved total annualized savings of 60,000 metric tons of CO2, about 18 percent above our goal of 51,000 metric tons. The savings - equivalent to 10,700 cars being taken off the road or eliminating the energy use of 4,400 households - benefited shareholders as well because we saved $17 million in energy costs.
In 2006, we took this commitment to a new level when we established the Environmental Leadership Council (ELC), our leadership team for great environmental stewardship. The ELC helps set environmental leadership strategies for Yum! and identifies beneficial environmental opportunities, then designs, tests and deploys programs to deliver on them.
The Future - Our Challenge, Our Advantage
Our focus thus far has been centered primarily on electrical energy conservation because it represents the greatest amount of energy consumed in our restaurants and our largest source of CO2 emissions. We recognize the need to broaden our scope to include rigorous measurements and reductions in our natural gas, solid waste, and oil impacts. Plans are being developed to evaluate conservation opportunities in these areas in 2009. We are also committed to exploring our use and disposal of water, and how we can reduce both our consumption and our water based effluents.
Climate change is one of the most important issues now facing the world, and we are aware of the urgency for action. We feel that we have only just begun to unleash the potential of our business to make a positive impact on the environment. We're moving forward and aggressively working to determine the fastest way to accomplish our goals.
Our system is focused on finding ways in which we can reduce our worldwide environmental impact, including:
- Equipment retrofits and energy efficient innovations;
- Better energy management systems;
- Behavioral changes related to use of energy, waste management in our restaurants including the spent grease from our fryers, and water reduction;
- Recycling paper and other restaurant packaging;
- Material selection and use in our building design and retrofits.