Monument Attends ESG Workshop to Boost Company-Wide EcoVadis Certification Achievements
May 15th, 2023
Monument’s commitment to sustainability isn’t anything new. Across our business and operations at every site, you can witness our teams creating new initiatives and uncovering innovative solutions to tighter regulations — and we’re not slowing down. In fact, our ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) journey is only gaining momentum.
Most recently, the efforts of both the Bayport and Kallo teams have earned them the EcoVadis certifications with Bronze and Silver statuses, respectively (learn more here). Through a very cumbersome process, including intensive questionnaires and supporting documentation, these certifications recognize this commitment to sustainable practices in our operations, supply chain, and product offerings through full data transparency.
That’s just the start. The next major step on our exciting ESG journey is obtaining an LLC certification and overall score for all Monument Chemical US facilities. And the cross-functional team behind the endeavor is well on their way, starting with its participation in the SOCMA ESG Workshop, “Developing an ESG Strategy,” this April.
“With ESG objectives driving new regulations and standards across the industry, the process of obtaining these certifications are also very new to companies across our industry,” Gloria O'Bannon, Corp HSSE Compliance Coordinator, explained. “And further, it’s an arduous submission process both with extensive requests for information and limitations to how much documentation you can provide. So SOCMA hosted this event to bring members together to share their priorities and best practices, identify regulatory changes at EPA, and offer solutions to common ESG issues.”
This includes full disclosure into areas like greenhouse emissions, labor, waste management, policies, etc. that impact the company's overall carbon footprint. “The knowledge sharing from this workshop presented us with better, more efficient ways to share the information needed,” Gloria added. “For example, due to child labor issues more commonly seen internationally, we had to provide documentation of practice in this area, which was a challenge for us since it isn’t something we think about regularly. But members at the event suggested taking photos of our federal labor posters in order to meet the requirements easily and with less documentation, which we didn’t even think about.”
And as the team pursues a company-wide US certification, the workshop offered helpful insight into defining and measuring Scope 3 Emissions as a major component of the submission process, giving the team a jump start in their preparation.
This also included the support of a third-party consulting company, ClimeCo. “They were instrumental in helping us organize a lot of our information to put us on the right track for the next audit and help us achieve the best overall score possible,” Stacy Johnson, Corp HSSE Process Leader, shared. “Gloria and Kay Jones, Houston Area Document Control Coordinator, were already in Kentucky initiating these efforts, and we’re really excited about our progress. In addition to attending other ESG workshops through SOCMA, we even discussed possibly co-hosting an event with The Heritage Group at our site to further this knowledge sharing between our organization and others in the industry.”
The work of our cross-functional team is riding high on the energy from the workshop, as well as from Bayport and Kallo’s recent achievements — projecting to obtain the LLC certification and receive our overall score by the end of May 2023.
To learn more about Bayport’s recent achievement of EcoVadis Bronze Status and the efforts behind that recognition, click here.