Meaningful sustainable change drives strong financial performance
Greif traces its roots back to 1877. The idea of being a conscientious global citizen, responsive community neighbor and responsible steward of the earth’s natural resources has been ingrained into the Company’s DNA since its inception by the Greif brothers. Today, we continue to honor our history as we focus on our future.
While Greif has experienced incredible success over the years, we remain committed to continuous improvement, always looking for ways to make our work, our products, our services and our Company better.
Our financial performance and sustainability strategy are mutually beneficial. Over the last five years we have grown our earnings by nearly 50 percent and our Free Cash Flow by more than three-fold, while returning more than $500 million in dividends to our owners. We leverage that strong financial performance to invest in our sustainability efforts and to safeguard and enhance our future profitability. Those strategies in turn enable stronger sales, increased efficiency and reduced costs that contribute to creating shared value for our customers, stakeholders and the environment. For example,
-We are committed to advancing our circular economy efforts by reducing, reusing and reconditioning / recycling products at the end of their useful lives. We are also advancing our circular supply chain and innovation capabilities by reducing waste in our operations.
-We are integrating our climate strategy into all aspects of operations to ensure we are reducing emissions and combating climate change to our fullest extent. We manufacture our products as efficiently as possible, implement energy and emissions projects throughout our operations and engage with partners across our value chain to further extend our impact beyond our walls.
-We have a strong focus on innovation. This allows us to identify new business models and solutions that will lead to new opportunities that can positively impact Greif’s financial results. As many of our customers set long-term goals, particularly on environmental topics such as energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions and waste reduction, we are positioning ourselves, and our products, to help them meet their objectives.
As a global organization, it is vital that we maintain stakeholder trust and generate meaningful shareholder returns. Whether through collaboration with our customers, partnerships with non-profit organizations, or any other interaction we have with our stakeholders, we work to instill high quality relationships by demonstrating our commitment to servant leadership and responsible business practices. Our sustainability initiatives help us demonstrate these commitments and directly impacts our brand, reputation and willingness for customers to do business with us.
