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Sustainability Approach
At Alcoa, sustainability is defined as using our values to build financial success, environmental excellence, and social responsibility through partnerships in order to deliver net long-term benefits to our shareowners, employees, customers, suppliers, and the communities in which we operate.
We recognize there are many definitions of sustainability. However, we felt it necessary to define sustainability in a way that takes it to the operational levels within our company.
Our commitment to sustainability has a long history and is evident every day—from the way we live our values to our strategic framework for sustainability supported by clear targets for measuring progress toward achievement of our vision for 2020. We believe that addressing sustainability makes us a better company, and a better company becomes a company of choice for governments and communities. This designation leads to better access to land, markets, capital, resources, and people.
We are fully committed to maintaining our sustainability direction, even during very difficult times. By doing so, we will emerge from this global economic crisis even stronger.
Our goal is to integrate sustainability concepts into our processes so they become part of how we do business. Key components to achieving this goal are understanding the expectations of our stakeholders and remaining transparent in reporting our progress as well as our setbacks.
We consider each employee a sustainability champion. Supporting them are sustainability professionals as well as individuals who are experts in various aspects of sustainability, such as environment and community relations.
We have developed a forward-looking corporate approach to sustainability that we continued to integrate into our overall business strategy in 2008. Due to the decentralized nature of Alcoa, implementation primarily occurs at the local level in accordance with our 2020 Strategic Framework for Sustainability.
Many of our business units are using complementary sustainability indicators around their sustainability challenges. They are also using workshops and other methods to engage customers, management, employees, communities, and other stakeholders in sustainability initiatives, leading to strategies and action plans. In addition, we use a variety of methods to educate our employees on sustainability.
For example, the objectives of the Brazilian Sustainability Steering Committee are to improve sustainability governance with the involvement and visibility of top management; increase accountability of business units and locations; create opportunities for leaders to share best practices while increasing their knowledge on sustainability; and accelerate the process of integrating sustainability into the organization.
In Europe, a sustainability director works with all the business units and countries in Europe to more fully integrate sustainability into their day-to-day activities.
Additional information on how we are implementing sustainability at the local level can be found on the following country and region pages: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, Guinea, Iceland, Jamaica, and Suriname.
At the corporate level, we take a leadership role on sustainability issues that are not only important to us but also to our industry and beyond. For example, climate change is clearly a global challenge, and it is our key sustainability issue as a company. Additional information about our efforts in this area can be found in the Environment section.
Other key sustainability achievements in 2008 included the following:
- Elevated responsibility for global sustainability from the director level to the vice president level;
- Announced a six-year extension to the Alcoa Foundation Conservation & Sustainability Fellowship Program;
- Created a new role in our procurement organization—director of sustainability— to manage overall coordination of the procurement sustainability strategy; and
- Elevated our Sustainable Infrastructure Market Development Team into a center of excellence at Alcoa, with its main pursuit being to develop and maintain global competency in sustainable product design and market growth.
We were recognized for these and other efforts through inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the seventh time and being named one of the most sustainable companies in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for the fourth (2008) and fifth (2009) years in a row. (See other awards.)
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