Case study: How Celestica treats waste responsibly

What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report Celestica identified a range of material issues, such as occupational health and safety, anti-corruption, non-discrimination, human rights assessments, emissions. Among these, treating waste responsibly stands out as a key material issue for Celestica.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The organization should identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process s of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Celestica engages with:

To identify and prioritise material topics Celestica engaged with its stakeholders through the following channels:

What actions were taken by Celestica to treat waste responsibly?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report Celestica reports that it took the following actions for treating waste responsibly:

• Enabling waste solutions
• Celestica helps its customers bring their innovations and product solutions to life by working behind the scenes at all stages of the product lifecycle – from design, prototype, manufacturing, and shipping to product recycling and refurbishing solutions. In its Industrial and Smart Energy businesses, Celestica is helping its customers bring smart trash receptacles to market. These highly complex, intelligent and connected systems collect trash bins only when full, which reduces energy costs and improves performance, sustainability, and waste reduction.

• Promoting circularity
• Celestica provides services that focus on designs with full lifecycle circularity, closed-loop systems, and after-market services. Offering products as a service is a tenet of the circular economy because it transforms the concept of ownership and encourages manufacturers to rethink how a product is used over its lifetime. Shifting mindsets from manufacturing products to delivering customer outcomes is growing the circular economy model. Celestica is working with customers to manage products through design, usage, maintenance, reuse, remanufacture, and recycling. This is being done through take-back programmes, keeping useful materials out of landfills or recycling streams, and screening and repairing products to be distributed back to customers. Within its Asset Recovery Services, Celestica has been able to create this circular model and properly recycle any residual materials.

• Organising the Global Waste Reduction Week
• 2019 marked Celestica’s fifth Global Waste Reduction Week, an event that engages employees in reducing waste. Employees at 14 sites participated in the event and, in total, more than 1,900 kg of material was diverted from landfill during the week:
  • Partnering to Reduce Waste (Toronto): Employees hosted an on-site showcase of sustainable partnerships, which included an employee donation drive for smartphones. The phones were refurbished and upgraded with accessible technologies and distributed to the visually impaired through a local charity.
  • Waste Reduction (Valencia): Site employees promoted waste reduction with educational pamphlets featuring best practices for plastic use in their canteens. Additionally, more than 120 kg of unused tables were disassembled and reused for work benches on the manufacturing line.
  • Electronics Recycling (Toronto, Mississauga, Newmarket, Penang, Song Shan Lake): Approximately 115 kg of obsolete electronic waste including batteries were diverted from landfill by being recycled ethically.
  • Book and Clothing Drives (Toronto, Mississauga, Monterrey, Newmarket, Tucson, Penang, Suzhou, Thailand, Valencia, Oradea): Around the world, Celestica employees held book, toy, and clothing drives to reduce overall waste and give back to their communities. More than 300 kg of goods including winter clothing, books, food, toys and more were collected and distributed to orphanages, shelters for the homeless, abused women, and refugees.
  • Greening Meals (Leixlip, Suzhou GBS, Shanghai): Each of these sites introduced reusable cutlery, plates or mugs in their employee cafeterias. It is estimated that these initiatives will reduce 5,400 kg of waste annually.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 306-2 Waste by type and disposal method

Disclosure 306-2 Waste by type and disposal method corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Targets: 3.9
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all
• Targets: 6.3
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Targets: 12.4, 12.5

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by Celestica, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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