On behalf of the employees, executive team and the Board of Directors, I am pleased to share our third Sustainability Report.
This report highlights SECURE Energy’s (“SECURE”) 2021 accomplishments and progress in the areas of people, safety, climate strategy, environment, community and governance, as well as outlining our future commitments and goals.
Embedding environment, social and governance (ESG) factors into our business strategies has never been more important given the ongoing challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past years, and more recently, geopolitical events such as the war in Ukraine impacting human rights and global energy security.
At SECURE, we recognize that our long-term success goes beyond the financial metrics of our business and we focus on connecting our strong employee culture with our corporate strategies to drive improved ESG performance.
2021 was a momentous year of change for SECURE. First and foremost was the merger with Tervita. To close a deal of this magnitude is a remarkable accomplishment and shows the strength of our collective talent. By leveraging our combined strengths, this merger provides us the opportunity to expand our breadth of services under a single integrated entity, enhancing the experience and overall service to our customers. The combined company’s talented employees will continue to drive sustainability priorities and performance.
We also made significant progress in our ESG portfolio, including the appointment of Rhonda Rudnitski as Vice President, Environment, Social and Governance, a newly established senior leadership position that affirms SECURE’s commitment to sustainability. In her position, Rhonda provides strategic and functional direction for ESG initiatives and monitors SECURE’s performance on key sustainability indicators. She previously held the role of Vice President, Health, Safety, Environment, Regulatory and Engineering with Tervita.
We took the following additional actions in 2021 to advance our ESG framework and address key issues which reflect our top priorities and the interests of our stakeholders:
- Completed research and analysis to continue the creation of our diversity and inclusion strategy
- Maintained the number of women on the Board of Directors at 25%, achieving our set target in 2021
- Appointed an independent director as Chairman of the Board
- Launched ESG Awareness training to introduce employees to ESG, why it is important to SECURE and how employees can get involved
- Installed staged caps at some of our closed landfill cells to reduce the amount of leachate generated and to reduce environmental impacts associated with leachate generation
- Continued growing our Indigenous Relations partnerships, worked with 89 Indigenous suppliers and spent $10.5 million with Indigenous businesses