Our Approach

By balancing economic, environmental and social impacts in our decision making and activities, we will create long-term shared value for our stakeholders and for Ball Corporation. This is our sustainability vision, which reflects our triple bottom line approach to sustainability and contributes to Ball becoming a more successful and sustainable enterprise.

Sustainability is also part of our Drive for 10 strategy, which leverages Ball’s strengths to achieve continued long-term success. For each of our corporate and operational sustainability priorities, we have defined why each sustainability priority is important for achieving long-term success and our Drive for 10 vision. More details can be found here.

Since we began a more formal approach to sustainability in 2006, we have broadened and deepened our efforts by working to embed sustainability within our operations and within the entire packaging supply chain. For example, we integrated sustainability into our annual strategic planning process to drive measureable environmental and social progress inside our operations.

Operations Embracing Sustainability

We use various tools to inform our approximately 14,500 employees about our sustainability efforts, to explain our company’s sustainability goals, to highlight improvements, to share best practices and to generate new ideas. To make sustainability more tangible for our employees, we introduced the term “Big 6” in 2008. This is a set of sustainability indicators that we can control inside our operations: safety, electricity, natural gas, water, waste and volatile organic compounds.

To drive measureable progress within our operations and to hold ourselves accountable, each plant commits to two-year sustainability goals. Progress is regularly evaluated with management and Ball’s Sustainability Steering Committee reviews progress by each division on a quarterly basis.

During the reporting period, we created a measurement system for our global beverage can operations that allows for monthly comparisons on 20 key manufacturing metrics, including the Big 6. The higher visibility of all plants’ performance with respect to these metrics helps to drive progress. Another program introduced in 2011 is a best practice identification, evaluation and sharing tool. The best practices with the greatest impact are shared with and implemented in other plants.

We also introduced the R. David Hoover Sustainability Award in 2011, named after our former chief executive officer and current chairman of the board. In each of our divisions, the annual performance and improvement of each plant is analyzed in ten categories. Alongside the Big 6, aspects such as promoting regional recycling initiatives or the team player behavior of each plant, are also assessed. The most successful facility in each division receives the award. This competition further increases the engagement of plants in measuring, understanding and improving their sustainability performance.