Our Commitment
Our Strategy
A lot has changed in the world since Synlait introduced its first Sustainability Strategy in 2018.
Ensuring the company is still focussing on the right goals to achieve its ambition to be ‘net positive for the planet’ is important so 2024 saw the sustainability team lead a strategy refresh.
This led to development of three new pillars for our activity: Climate, Nature and Wellbeing.
Sustainability and transparent reporting are important to Synlait. Our Integrated Climate Report incorporates Synlait’s mandated climate-related disclosure, sustainability report and greenhouse gas inventory for the 2024 financial year.
Climate
Nature
Wellbeing
Climate change is one of the biggest issues we face as a planet and Synlait is dedicated to meeting our commitments here. Our science-based targets remain unchanged, we have roadmaps established, and we are dedicated to meeting these by 2028.
Our climate strategy is bigger than just meeting our targets. We are committed to:
Reduction in Coal Use
Investing in our assets to allow us to remove coal as a fuel in our processes by 2030 and reduce our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2028.
GHG On-Farm
Utilising Lead With PrideTM and our customised greenhouse gas tool to support and incentivise our farmers to reduce GHG on-farm. We are also working closely with farmer suppliers to implement new technologies and change our farming systems to reduce on-farm greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate Adaptation
The effects of climate change will produce more extreme weather events, and our focus has to be on building resilience across our business and our farmer suppliers. We are integrating climate adaptation strategies across the business to offset the potential physical impacts.
Sustainable Procurement
Our climate change responsibility extends through our value chain, and we are focused on how we can make more sustainable choices in our procurement, incorporating
a balanced climate and financial approach to procurement contracts, such as optimising shipping and sourcing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Whakapuāwai
Our biodiversity programme, Whakapuāwai grows over 60,000 native plants each year. We provide these to our farmers and community groups for planting projects. We distributed our 250,000th plant in 2024. We now have years of plant growing expertise to support our farmer suppliers to sequester carbon on their farms.
Net Zero
We are committed to setting our long-term net zero target.
For more information and to see all of our commitments, read our Integrated Climate Report – 2024.
Synlait is a business with strong links to New Zealand’s whenua (land) so ensuring our sustainability strategy has a focus on biodiversity, soil health and water is important.
Our intention is to set science-based targets and action roadmaps for water, biodiversity and soil health and prepare for nature-based disclosures.
Water
We are taking action to protect water quality and ensure it is used efficiently across our supply chain. Our commitments include ensuring 100% of our farms are acting to achieve catchment-specific water quality objectives, delivering a 45% reduction in modelled nitrogen loss to waterways per kilogram of milk solids by 2028 (from an 2018 base year) and achieving a 20% reduction in water use per tonne of product produced by 2028, from an 2018 base year, at Dunsandel.
Whakapuāwai
Our biodiversity programme has made a significant contribution to water quality via riparian planting on farms since it was first launched in 2020. We intend to utilise Whakapuāwai even more powerfully going forward. Our intention is to broaden its purpose to focus on biodiversity and soil health and become an ‘ecological centre of excellence’ focussed on world leading on-farm initiatives.
Circular Economy
We have a responsibility to limit any negative impacts from the waste and packaging of the products we produce. We are committed to diverting 99% of non-hazardous waste from landfill and for 100% of our product packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable (currently we are sitting at 99.7%).
For more information and to see all of our commitments, read our Integrated Climate Report – 2024.
When Synlait talks about wellbeing, we are referring to both people and animals. We see it as our responsibility to care for both – right throughout our value chain.
On-Farm Animal Wellbeing
On farm, our Lead With PrideTM programme has ensured Synlait has taken a leadership position on animal wellbeing since 2018. We are now developing a Social Responsibility Strategy and will be working with all of our Lead With PrideTM farmers on a customised Animal Health and Welfare Plan.
People Wellbeing
We will be releasing a Wellbeing Roadmap and Wellbeing Scoring system in 2025 which will guide actions to improve the wellbeing of people in Synlait. This roadmap will focus on meaningful work, work design, connectedness and diversity (including neuro, gender and cultural diversity).
Gender Balance
From a gender perspective, we have already achieved our target of having between 40% and 50% of our senior managers or specialists as women. We will retain this target in order to ensure we continue to track to this.
Gender Pay Gap
Our gender pay gap is one key objective that has not met expectations to date. We are committed to closing our gender pay gap to less than 5%.
Health and Safety
We are committed to the health and safety of our people and will continue to dedicate ourselves to driving our Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate down to below five by 2029.
For more information and to see all of our commitments, read our Integrated Climate Report – 2024.