The GOJO Purpose, Saving Lives and Making Lives Better Through Well-Being Solutions, inspires us to continuously innovate and find new ways to enhance the lives of those we touch. We recognize our role in creating a healthy future and put great effort into understanding and proactively managing the social, environmental and economic impacts of our business.
Living our Purpose allows us to have a positive impact on public health and the world in which we live, each day. It drives us to find new ways to create Sustainable Value through innovative solutions—solutions that bring social, environmental and economic value for all GOJO stakeholders.
As a family-owned enterprise, we are not expected to report on our sustainability progress as part of our SEC reporting, but we believe it is important to keep our stakeholders informed—both so they can see our goals in action and understand and engage in our work going forward. Each year, we openly share our practices, learnings and the challenges we have encountered along the way and display how we are creating Sustainable Value through our Sustainability Report.
Changing How the World Stays Well – GOJO 2017-2018 Sustainability Report
We recently launched our seventh report, Changing How the World Stays Well, which focuses on our progress throughout 2017 and 2018 against our 2020 Sustainable Value Strategies and Goals, which focus on creating social, environmental and economic value for our stakeholders.
Highlights from the report include achieving our goal to power GOJO U.S. distribution operations by renewable energy two years ahead of schedule. In 2018, we completed the installation of a 755-megawatt-hour solar array at our 1.3-million-square-foot distribution center in Wooster, Ohio. The solar array is providing energy without producing harmful air and water emissions or consuming non-renewable natural resources.
As part of our efforts to improve energy efficiency, GOJO is recovering waste heat from air compressors, better insulating our facilities, and, in 2017, replaced nearly 20,000 fluorescent lamps with LED bulbs, saving 1.8 million kilowatt-hours per year.
The report also covers sustainable innovation in product development, including the:
- Launch of PURELL® brand HEALTHY SOAP® with CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology, a breakthrough hand soap that is gentle on skin, contains no antibacterial ingredients,1 preservatives, parabens or phthalates and reaches into skin’s cracks and crevices two times better than regular soap to lift and wash away more than 99 percent of dirt and germ.2 CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology soaps are made with natural ingredients, far exceeding the 65 percent USDA BioPreferred® Program requirements with 90 percent biobased content. 3 They also rinse faster and cleaner to save an estimated six gallons per refill compared to regular soap. 4
- Reformulation of the top-selling GOJO® MULTI GREEN® into a green-certified heavy-duty hand cleaner, GOJO® MULTI GREEN® ECO. The product now not only uses sustainable scrubbing particles to remove dirt but also meets the USDA BioPreferred® Program and ECOLOGO certification requirements.
- Invention of the touch-free PURELL® ES8 Dispensing Systems that address the two most common service issues – worn out batteries and empty dispensers – and also represents a 68 percent reduction in battery waste and a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,5 when compared to leading touch-free systems on the market.6
In 2018 we conducted our largest sustainability event to date with a Sustainability Fair that had over 1,200 team member participants, which helped us exceed our goal of engaging at least 40 percent of our workforce in SWOW™ (Sustainable Ways of Working), our unique approach to integrating sustainability into everything we do at GOJO.
We also partnered with local businesses, to impact how individuals stay well in our local community of Northeast Ohio:
- Hattie Larlham- To create meaningful work opportunities for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
- Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank – To provide donated products for redistribution to help people who may not otherwise have access to hand hygiene products.
- Green Arrow Engineering and the City of Wooster – A creative way to reclaim scrap product, using it as feedstock in the City of Wooster’s anaerobic digester, which takes organic waste and converts it into biogas that powers Wooster area homes.
- Ohio Rail Development Commission and Norfolk Southern Railway – Made significant upgrades and reconstruction to reopen a rail siding that connects GOJO’s Wooster campus to a nearby rail system, resulting in ethanol shipments with a carbon footprint that’s six-times smaller per ton, per mile than those shipped by truck.
View the 2017-2018 GOJO Sustainability Report.