Communities

We engage and support our communities to help them thrive.

Supporting local communities where we operate also helps us strengthen our business by being a good neighbour and an employer of choice, enhancing our corporate image, and exploring new models and markets.

Our commitment

We are committed to engaging with local people to understand how we can make a difference in our communities as part of our wider ambition to deliver positive societal impact.

We contribute through local community engagement programmes, led by our network of Way Beyond Good Champions with support from employee volunteers. We also channel support for wider communities through the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation, which focuses on projects that strengthen civil society and create positive impact for the environment.

Our targets

Our progress

In 2022, we increased the overall impact of our community engagement programmes through global campaigns on Resource+ and Food+, led by our Way Beyond Good Champions, and local initiatives around the world. We also expanded our community recycling models to more locations and sought partners to help us create a scaled-up model for our Cartons for Good programme that turns food loss into nutritious meals for people in need.

Engaging communities by championing Food+

Our Way Beyond Good Champions’ global Food+ campaign this year aimed to have a positive impact on communities, while raising awareness of SIG’s role in preventing food waste and delivering nutrition to people around the world.

Employees at our plants in Saalfelden (Austria) and Rayong (Thailand) prepared meals for local people in need, and members of our team in Linnich (Germany) coordinated donations of food products from SIG and other businesses. In Brazil, our Way Beyond Good Champions held a webinar on how food can impact our lives and quality of life, as well as organising a lunch for 80 waste workers to thank them for their support in recycling of our products.

Cooking workshops at our sites in Neuhausen (Switzerland) and Cluj (Romania) brought groups of employees together to prepare recipes from leftovers and share ways to tackle food waste.

Teams across our Asia Pacific South region ran a “Clean Plate Challenge” to demonstrate how to eat without food waste and we set up a “Help Yourself” area in the office canteen in Taiwan to share unwanted food rather than throwing it away.

Performance in 2022

Delivering positive impact through community engagement

• Our Way Beyond Good Champions celebrated their fifth anniversary this year. The community engagement programmes they led contributed to a total impact score¹ of 21,417 through 28 programmes in 2022, up by 25% from 17,096 in 2020. We held a second global conference for the Champions, joined by our Chief People & Culture Officer, as well as establishing a new award programme to recognise their efforts in future.
• Local teams used our Way Beyond Good Champions engagement campaigns to support communities while learning about the featured topics of Food+ (see Food+) and Resource+ (see Resource+). For example, our team in Australia donated electronic waste to a local charity that repairs and resells the equipment to disadvantaged members of the community or uses it to train jobseekers. In Mexico, we sponsored the collection and sale of recyclable materials to raise funds for a centre that supports people with autism. Teams in Austria and Thailand prepared meals for local people in need as part of our Food+ campaign (see case study above). Several of our sites also continued to regularly collect and donate food products to NGOs to support local communities.
• To support emergency aid for those affected by the war in Ukraine, SIG matched donations by employees to UNHCR’s Ukraine emergency response and UNICEF’s life-saving support for children from Ukraine. Teams around the world also offered their support for Ukrainian refugees, including collecting donations of clothes, food, hygiene articles and toys in Germany, preparing and distributing meals to refugees in Poland, fundraising through sales of a painting by an SIG employee in the USA, and holding an art exhibition in Romania to raise money for a talented 15-year-old Ukrainian refugee artist and the Red Cross.
• Other community engagement programmes supported local causes. For example, our team in the United Arab Emirates donated more than 40 laptops to a local centre for children with autism, and employees in Mexico built bicycles for donation to a local children’s organisation at a teambuilding event at the new SIG plant in Querétaro.
• Sites in several countries ran campaigns encouraging employees to give blood to support local health services, and SIG was awarded the Solidarity Certificate of the German Red Cross Blood Donation Service.

Contributing through the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation

• We contributed €235,000 in grants to support the work of the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation in 2022.
• Building on the experience of our pilot, we are developing plans to scale up Cartons for Good, the Foundation’s flagship project, to save more food from being lost by turning it into nutritious meals. We have developed a technical concept and begun discussions with potential partners who can help us implement it (see Food+).
• In cooperation with the NGO so+ma in Brazil, the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation is working to extend our community recycling model to Indonesia in 2023 (see Resource+).
• We directed our annual corporate festive donation, via the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation, to a WWF project that will improve learning conditions at a school in an extremely hot region close to the Marismas Nacionales Biosphere Reserve in Mexico by installing solar panels to provide electricity to power fans and other equipment.

Community investment (philanthropic activities) by type in 2022

1 Impact score is derived through an assessment by the employees and communities involved in our community engagement projects based on who benefits from the project, the type of impact it has and its potential to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.