We believe that there are three main areas in Sustainability:
Ethics AND Environment AND Economics
We do this because we believe that each of these areas cannot be looked at separately as there are so many crossovers.
At First Milk, we've got robust processes in place in a number of areas.
On animal husbandry, the First Milk Farm Sustainability Programme co-ordinates a herd comparison website for our farmers and we're running both herd health and lameness prevention workshops. We've had a bull calf scheme in Scotland for nearly two years. Our plans are to roll this out further, and we are working with our farmers on this.
Health and safety is a big driver across all First Milk sites and has become ingrained as a way of working. Business ethics, supplier relationships and food safety have also become part of the day job.
We are currently running 'Carbon Smart' and 'Money from Muck' seminars for our farmers. We are also working with a number of renewable energy suppliers and are making particularly good progress in this area through our partnership with Land Engineering.
At our manufacturing sites, our cheese packing plant at Maelor sends zero process waste to landfill and we've targeted our Lake District and Haverfordwest creameries to achieve zero process waste to landfill during this financial year.
If any focus on Sustainability is going to fly, it has to deliver on economic sustainability. It has to deliver farmers an improved margin over time. In order to maximise that we need to deliver greater efficiencies right along the supply chain and each of us have a role and a responsibility in achieving this.
As you can see, we are doing quite a lot on Sustainability - and everything we have done has made the business more efficient either in reduced energy, reduced waste, reduced water usage, reduced packaging.
We've developed a strategy and plan for sustainability and we will ingrain that with employees and producers, as well as engaging with our key external stakeholders as part of this framework. Titled 'First things First' our report details our strategy, and how we will measure our success
