To SECURE, ESG is an approach to integrating environment, social and governance issues into risk management and daily business processes across the organization. It is also an opportunity to improve processes, engage employees and spark innovation to drive new tools and technologies to support the achievement of our ESG specific goals.
Most importantly, ESG aligns with our corporate value of doing the right thing. ESG allows us to run our business better and helps us be the best service provider to our customers. SECURE works collaboratively with our customers to challenge what’s possible – and ESG is another way to develop innovative solutions in partnership with our customers.
Establishing a Dedicated ESG Leader and Team
On July 2, 2021, SECURE appointed Rhonda Rudnitski as VP, ESG. This newly established senior leadership position in combination with the existing ESG Board Committee, affirms SECURE's commitment to sustainability. In her position, Rhonda provides strategic and functional direction for ESG initiatives and monitor SECURE's performance on key sustainability indicators. She previously held the role of VP, Health, Safety, Environment, Regulatory and Engineering with Tervita.
As President and CEO, Rene Amirault explains, SECURE created the VP ESG and team roles for two reasons, “it demonstrates how important ESG is to SECURE, and it demonstrates our commitment with dedicated resources, goals, and action plans to ensure initiatives are undertaken.”
Defining ESG
Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) refers to the following criteria that impact our company and our stakeholders.
- Environment criteria address how our operations impact the environment and our efforts toward environmental stewardship. In SECURE’s case, it is also how we help our customers achieve their environmental goals through the services we deliver.
- Social criteria address how we manage relationships with our stakeholders, including employees, customers, supply chain and communities.
- Governance criteria refers to our leadership, Board of Directors, policies, internal controls and transparency.
We began reporting ESG / Sustainability criteria in 2014 and have steadily increased our level of reporting every year since then. We look forward to releasing our comprehensive Sustainability Report this spring.
Integrating ESG into the Business
In Q4, SECURE launched ESG awareness training for all employees to provide general awareness about ESG, become aware of how SECURE implements ESG principles and strategies, and how employees can help identify opportunities and participate in our ESG journey.
Rhonda shares, "implementing ESG training company-wide is the first step in integrating ESG into our organization. If we have an opportunity to reduce our energy intensity or fuel consumption, we want to know about it so we can help report on it. ESG is an opportunity to ask ourselves, "Just because we did it in the past doesn't mean we need to do it in the future."
As part of the launch of ESG Awareness Training, we also launched ESG ID, which is a process to submit employee ESG ideas. ESG ID creates an opportunity to capture new ideas and current initiatives, so the organization can develop best practices and share them across the organization. ESG ID creates a platform to submit ideas with the potential for ideas to evolve into actions/results.
Rhonda explains why sharing ESG-related ideas from the employees is important, "We are doing great things already, and in some cases, we don't know about them. Even the small ideas matter because they add up to bigger things and we need to share these stories so the whole company can learn from each other."
Each idea is submitted, reviewed, and vetted by the ESG team and sub-committees for evaluation. If it is a feasible opportunity, a project manager will be assigned, and a work group will be created to dig deeper into the opportunity. Although not every idea will be viable, we'll hold on to each idea in case market conditions change and old ideas provide new value. Regardless of the outcome, the ESG team follows up with all ideas.
Stay tuned as we share examples of these ideas and initiatives at Secure-Energy.com. You can also learn more about our 2021 performance through our Sustainability Report coming this spring.
