Organic Processing Vo1.7 #5 - September/October 2010

Pacs to stand up and further reduce plastic use by 10 percent; reducing granola bar packaging to use 36 percent less paperboard.

• Distribution: Our transportation team worked with our shipping suppliers to increase our use of intermodal and backhauling, resulting in a reduction of absolute CO2 emissions from transportation by more than 11 percent.

• Consumer education: Nature’s Path is empowering youth through involvement in Free The Children’s “We Day,” a rock concert for social change leading youth on a journey from thinking about “me” to “we.” Nature’s Path wants to impart the value of purchasing power as a conscious decision that can affect change. We also demonstrate this through our EnviroKidz line that donates 1 percent of our EnviroKidz sales to wildlife protection and habitat conservation.

• Also under the category of consumer education, Nature’s Path sponsored the first-annual Hemp History Week—an unprecedented grassroots education campaign to renew strong support for hemp farming in the United States.

These achievements are all merely stepping stones on a path to continual improvement as we aim to leave the earth better than we found it. Looking toward the future we are focused on driving our waste to landfill down to zero, reducing our energy and natural gas use by focusing on efficiency and finding the best ways to engage our team members in becoming active in the community. While many of our sustainability initiatives are generated internally, we also look to our engaged group of conscious consumers for their constructive feedback. Discussions hosted on Nature’s Path’s Facebook site, Twitter and Just-Means provide us a means of sharing our progress while also getting great new ideas for how we can propel our-

selves further along the path. We’re lucky to have customers who are willing to share their thoughts on sustainability initiatives they feel we have done right (like the many positive comments we received on our packaging reductions), and also let us know when they think we can go further, (like requests for packaging material that is more easily recyclable). We’d love for you to join the conversation, too. o