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While they are separate pursuits that originated through different needs, Operational Excellence and Reliability are equally important in driving efficiency gains and helping to improve our environmental performance.
This is especially true in our Rental division’s operations, which currently account for approximately emissions and use the company’s largest percentages of water and energy.5 We anticipate ongoing results from our Operational Excellence and Reliability efforts will help us continue to lessen the environmental impact ...
Often, the minor changes that can arise from these improvements make dramatic impacts.
Technology has had a large role in helping reduce our water and energy needs, GHG emissions intensity, raw materials requirements, and waste.
However, more effective processes – layered over improved technology and increased employee-partner training and accountability – have considerably reduced water withdrawals and energy use in our Rental processing plants.
Recent Operational Excellence efforts have had a significant impact on our resource requirements.
As a result of fewer wash loads, our wash process requires less energy, water, and wash chemistry to process the same amount of product.
Redefining Reliability Cintas’ Reliability program centers on a four-part equation that supports equipment safety, product quality, process efficiencies, and environmental compliance.
And when systems are operating efficiently, they require fewer utilities and inputs to work properly – meaning less water, less electricity, less steam, less compressed air, and less chemistry to perform the same tasks.
We’re beginning to evolve our Reliability program to help us achieve alignment with our emissions targets along our Path to Net Zero.
By placing increased attention on maintaining efficiency gains, we also hope to further increase the safety, quality, and environmental performance of our equipment and further minimize energy and water needs.
In response, custom monitoring technology was developed and deployed throughout our Rental footprint, and the proprietary application remains in use today.
The program requires plant management to self-audit and submit their location’s performance metrics at regular intervals.
Those submissions are centralized and analyzed by our Operational Excellence Team, who have a complete view of our entire production footprint, and whose dashboard provides instant insight into each location’s performance.
Achieving optimal performance in run time and run efficiency directly impacts our plants’ ability to generate improvements on our environmental footprint.
Ultimately this helps lower our water, energy, and chemical usage.
This ongoing initiative helps plant management identify inefficient wash-sling-loading processes, holds employee-partners accountable, and ultimately helps make our entire laundry process more efficient.
The testing scope demonstrated potential operational efficiency gains of more than water withdrawal of up to 350 million gallons per year, and millions of dollars of savings in utility and chemistry costs.
ESG REPORT ABOUT CINTAS OUR ESG JOURNEY ENVIRONMENT SOCIAL GOVERNANCE APPENDIX OVERVIEW AND APPROACH With our company origins rooted in sustainable practices, environmental consciousness is a central consideration in Cintas’ business model.
Almost years ago, Doc and Amelia Farmer’s business concept minimized the need for new materials by recycling potential waste.
We also aim to pursue opportunities that help us use our resources to their fullest extent possible, including energy, water, materials, and waste.
Our need for raw materials As we continue to seek out opportunities to do more with less, we also make investments in our business that help us further reduce our environmental footprint.
And we leverage procedures and engineering to further amplify these impacts across our organization.
As our business continues to grow, we utilize logistical strengths and innovation in our distribution chain and our route-based delivery system to reduce our environmental impact from those inputs.
As an enterprise, we utilize systemic checks and balances to help us achieve our environmental goals and drive efficiencies.
It reiterates our company’s preference to conserve natural resources, minimize waste in our operations, and support our customers’ sustainability efforts.
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Our Environmental Management System (EMS) builds off our Code of Conduct and Business Ethics Compliance policy.
This details our expectation that all employee-partners perform their work in an ethical and law-abiding manner, including compliance with all pertinent environmental laws and regulations.
Our EMS is outlined in our Environmental Policy.
The system designates the responsibility for identification and compliance with applicable environmental regulations (federal, state, provincial, and local) to location leaders.
Our EMS empowers all Cintas employee-partners to notify Cintas’ Corporate Chemical and Environmental Engineering Group with any concerns of a potential or actual noncompliance issue.
Together, Cintas’ Corporate Chemical and Environmental Engineering Group and local partners can identify issues and implement solutions, training, support, and contractor or vendor oversight to address the concerns and apply necessary corrective measures.
To help maintain our locations’ awareness and understanding of how our operations impact the environment, specific training is included in our company’s certification process for all new Plant Managers, Maintenance Supervisors, and Maintenance Technicians.
Further, these groups must take annual learning modules on environmental compliance and water optimization.
AND ENERGY Cintas recognizes the effect and influence business and commerce have on the environment.
Energy is vital to our business and using it in the most efficient manner is critical to our long-term success, as well as being central in our efforts to reduce our GHG emissions.
As responsible corporate citizens, we must continue to recognize reductions in our overall energy consumption and adopt more efficient practices so the energy we do require goes further and does more.
Cintas’ ambition to achieve Net Zero GHG emissions by lower our carbon footprint, lessen our energy use, and minimize our overall environmental impact.
As we progress toward this target, we expect to identify further opportunities and initiatives that contribute to our reduction in emissions.
Our long-time commitment to preserve our environment and support the communities we serve is evident in our focus on process improvements and innovations.
Our suppliers account for the largest percentage of our Scope of our total GHG emissions.
As we seek to lessen our own business’s impact on the environment, we look to influence, educate, and help them reduce their emissions.
Together, all these efforts help maximize our assets, operate more efficiently, and lessen our environmental impact on a day-to-day basis. APPROACH Our PACE Team is a cross-functional group that works with our leadership teams to identify and implement a broader decarbonization strategy.
With fuel – natural gas, propane, and gasoline – being a key consideration in our operations, the PACE Team is also working with the business to evaluate emerging and evolving alternative-fuel options.
This includes prioritizing work with our vendors to help innovate more sustainable solutions with non-carbon and renewable energy sources.
https://cint.as/ INITIATIVES Most of the energy we use includes electricity (primarily for lighting and process equipment) and fuel – including natural gas and propane, among other natural energy sources – for facility heat, as well as dryers, boilers, and steam tunnels in our processing plants.
We also use fuel, primarily in the form of gasoline, to power our fleet.
We continue to evaluate how our facilities are built and powered, and we’ve begun evaluating solar as a potential renewable energy source for our processing facilities.
With the long-term goal to significantly reduce – if not eventually eliminate – our fleet’s carbon-based fuel requirements, we’ve launched our EV pilot program.
Minimizing Our Energy Needs In our processing plants – the largest source of energy consumption in our enterprise’s footprint – we currently have systems installed that help minimize our energy needs.
Our heat reclaimer system is among the technology already in place that helps us reduce our energy requirements to heat and cool water used in our wash process.
RECLAIMING HEAT Our processing plants use water and energy to help transform dirty laundry into clean uniforms and textiles.
One key engineering process that helps reduce the amount of energy it takes to heat our water to correct temperatures involves heat reclaimers.
In this system, two sets of pipes are installed concentrically and work concurrently to help balance the temperature of our process water, which reduces the amount of energy required to bring it to required temperatures.
The inside set of pipes transports cold water in from the municipal system, while the outside set of pipes routes the hot wastewater from our wash alleys.
With the system’s pipe design, the hot wastewater transfers its heat to the cold municipal water, with their temperatures balancing within each other.
By reusing the heat generated in our washing process to preheat the inflowing municipal water we use less energy to achieve the necessary water temperatures at key stages of our laundering process.
We must all work together to create true and lasting reductions in emissions that are generated throughout our value chain, especially through collaborative efforts.
Our current strategy prioritizes early investment and financial resources in areas that we expect to have the broadest and most significant impacts on our overall environmental footprint – especially our energy use and resulting emissions.
As technologies develop, Cintas will continue to evaluate their potential to support lower energy requirements and accelerate our Path to Net Zero.
TRANSITIONING OUR DIESEL FLEET Since FY’ran on diesel fuel, we have been steadily removing diesel-burning vehicles from our fleet.
In our previous ESG report, we disclosed environmental data for our Rental operations – both facilities and fleet – located only in the United States.
This year, we expanded both our emissions and our energy data to widen the breadth of our disclosures to reflect all of our operations in the United States and Canada, including facilities, fleet, and aviation.
EMISSIONS INTENSITY CONTINUES DOWNWARD TREND Our focus on operationalizing efficiencies throughout our organization has resulted in an almost reduction in emissions intensity6 since our FY’19 base year.
Over the last four fiscal years, we’ve lowered our annual emissions intensity from in FY’22.
Following decreases of our emissions intensity of emissions intensity by another 7.5% in FY’22.
Our Operational Excellence and Reliability efforts have helped us realize these annual reductions in gross metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MTCOthe Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions produced by our facilities since FY’19.
Our energy requirements have decreased in the wake of our ongoing Operational Excellence and Reliability initiatives and facility enhancements.
In the last four years, we have reduced energy intensity25%, from 2,362 GJ/$M in our FY’19 base year to 1,779 GJ/$M in FY’22.
The annual decrease in our energy intensity for FY’continued our steady reduction during the previous three years.
Since our FY’total energy use by almost 2.3 million gigajoules, representing more than a 14% reduction in gross energy use during that time.
Our energy use reductions are more impressive considering our business growth during that same time.
Reduced our use of natural gas since FY’needing 8,964,314 gigajoules in the base year to requiring 7,887,877 in FY’22.
ESG REPORT ABOUT CINTAS OUR ESG JOURNEY ENVIRONMENT SOCIAL GOVERNANCE APPENDIX FACILITYFOCUSED ENERGY REDUCTIONS Throughout the United States and Canada, our facilities of all sizes allow us to fulfill the needs of our four business divisions.
This is a significant area of opportunity along our Path to Net Zero, and our teams have been working to identify opportunities to lessen the energy required to operate our facilities.
As FY’of our multiple-year, company-wide LED lighting transition project to help us lower energy use at some of our older, more energy-intensive locations.
The LEDs installed at the completed locations will save the company almost kilowatt hours of energy annually – equating to 16,501 metric tons of CO2e avoided each year.
In FY’technology and launched an effort to begin piloting solar power at one of our Rental facilities.
We anticipate that the data will allow us to evaluate the system’s performance yearround, as well as comparing the costs of operation against traditional utility-based energy sources.
Ultimately, the performance of the pilot system in Piscataway will help us better evaluate how renewable energy sources like solar may fit into our future.
PLANS Cintas engineering is systematically evaluating energy- and water-reduction capabilities for use in our existing and future facilities.
Some of our facilities currently employ various energy-reduction technologies, including entrances with multiple doors, timing mechanisms on the HVAC and lighting systems, water-flow reducers, and thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) roofs and ceilings made of lightercolored materials to reflect radiant heat.
Since have LED lighting installed, including external LED lighting configurations that create zero light spillage (photometric pollution) at our properties’ boundaries.
This would incorporate a consistent set of energy-reducing technologies across all our operations.
WATER STEWARDSHIP Water is a central resource to our business and is a necessary input in one of our key business services.
Because of water’s importance in our operations, we believe Cintas has a profound responsibility to be mindful, considerate, and deliberate in our interactions with this vital natural resource.
As a company, we recognize that water is already a scarce resource, so we strive to be a responsible community leader and respect our communities’ right to water.
To strengthen our resolve as a water consumer, we continue to explore opportunities that help lessen our water consumption.
And as a responsible water steward, we continuously monitor our operations and processes, so we discharge water back to our local communities in a sustainable, responsible manner.
WATER MANAGEMENT POSITION Our Water Position outlines how we work to evolve our business practices that involve water, and informs our efforts to conserve water and minimize our water draw.
Engaging in cooperative relationships with our vendors, suppliers, and customers to identify opportunities and incorporate innovations to help manage water more responsibly throughout our value chain These ambitions – added to our existing laundering processes, which require less water (and energy) than both traditiona...
We take pride in our water-conservation efforts to date.
In addition to our ongoing efforts to minimize water requirements and maximize water conservation throughout our company, we are placing focused attention on increasing our water-reuse efforts.
For instance, we are seeking to build on the success that our production facilities around the Great Lakes have had in expanding their water reuse.
As we aim to prioritize higher water reuse in areas of significant need, specific challenges presented by our locations in water-stressed regions provide us with opportunities to test and pilot programs.
The majority of our FY’from 14 major water basins.
https://cint.as/ APPROACH AND STRATEGY Cintas’ efforts to increase water conservation go back decades.
The less water we use, the lower our costs – especially in areas where water prices are at a premium because of local restrictions or regulations, decreasing water availability, and/or localized conservation programming.
Implementation of water-reuse technologies Throughout our water journey, we’ve fostered a culture of innovation among our employee-partners and vendors and have challenged them to modernize the commercial laundry industry.
Exploring and installing broader waterreuse technologies Water Conservation We’re proud of our legacy of water-conservation efforts, and we know our ongoing commitment has produced a positive ripple effect throughout our industry.