Ocean Health and Biodiversity

At Cargill, we hold ourselves and our suppliers to a high standard when it comes to conserving water resources and reducing environmental impact across all of our supply chains. We support evidence-based approaches to comply with regulations and improve sustainable practices that protect ocean health and biodiversity.

The maritime shipping industry contributes to many of the challenges affecting the water quality and marine life of our oceans. While the majority of maritime pollution worldwide comes from land-based sources, marine transport plays a role through industry practices such as waste discharge from ships that clutter the oceans with debris, spills of oil and other substances, ballast water discharge that can carry invasive species and other pollutants, and acidification that affects ocean biodiversity.

IMO resolutions and other industry regulations address many of these issues, such as the 2017 convention on ballast water management that specifies where and in what manner shippers can discharge it. Recent developments related to the IMO Global Sulphur Cap are more controversial.

We work with our ship owner partners and other suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of our operations in the following priority areas: accidents and spills, waste and exhaust gas cleaning systems.

Making progress

In 2017, we established a series of targets to ensure that we limit the impact of our ocean transportation business on the marine environment. These include adhering to our Supplier Code of Conduct, exploring the use of exhaust gas cleaning systems and preventing oil spills. Our three key key targets have been set as follows:

• Include Supplier Code of Conduct guidelines for best practices with respect to waste management on all voyage instructions.
• Explore the use of exhaust gas cleaning systems within our time-chartered fleet and work with partners to understand impact and ensure safety.
• Achieve zero oil spills of 10m3 or more, and zero other incidents causing material negative environmental impact.

We have made solid progress over the last 12 months and are particularly pleased to have achieved zero oil spills of 10m3 or more and zero other incidents causing negative material environment. To increase transparency in this field, we are implementing more robust tracking and reporting across all vessel sizes and ship owners. We have also distributed our Cargill Supplier Code of Conduct to all of our suppliers, including our ship owner partners.

You can read more about our efforts to progress in ocean health and biodiversity in our 2018 Corporate Responsibility Report.