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Hormel Foods Corporate Responsibility Essay

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Companies in packaging and meat industry like Hormel Foods are in needs of great amounts of water. Therefore, they are exposed to intensive “regulatory, reputational, and financial risk” related to water usage and water pollution resulting directly or indirectly from their daily operations. These are both important issues that Hormel Foods are doing their best to address. Based on the 2015 Hormel Foods Corporate Responsibility Report, the company has set their goal to reduce water usage by 10 percent or 0.5 billion gallons by 2020 in 2011. All operations in both water-deficient locations and other manufacturing locations are required to engage in the water use reduction projects, only that the operations in water-deficient areas has different standards set. Until 2015, …show more content…

Thus, there is no information about their actions in tackling this issue. However, in fact, as mentioned in the 2017 Shareholder Resolution requesting water stewardship policy, the company received “eight notices of environmental non-compliance and reported a $ 2,600,000 fine for a water related enforcement order at a Minnesota facility” in 2015. As a result, Hormel Foods’ stakeholders asked the company for policies to address this problem, and the company announced in 2016 to work on reducing pollution impacts. Also, Hormel Foods, and several other food companies, participated in the AgWater Challenge organized by Ceres and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The firm committed to develop their water stewardship policy in order to reduce risks of water contamination at their own facilities, contract animal growers and feed suppliers. In addition, the Clean Water Act (CWA) of the U.S. regulated “discharges of pollutants into the waters and the quality standards for surface waters”. It also authorized EPA to issue wastewater standards and water quality standards for industries to

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