SAN MIGUEL GROUP
PHILIPPINE STAR: What has your group contributed toward nation-building?
San Miguel Corp. ChairMan eduardo CojuangCo jr. and San Miguel Corp. preSident and Coo raMon ang: SMC is one of the Philippines’ largest conglomerates. We’ve long since realized that our businesses can have a great impact on social issues.
With so many now turning to the private sector for leadership, effective services and bold thinking, we believe in providing solutions that make business sense and deliver social good at the same time.
Call it shared value or corporate social responsibility, but the idea that our competitiveness and the vitality of our communities rely heavily on each other is one that has taken root in every corner of our organization. It’s evident in how we’ve approached expansion. Rather than take the easy road to profit, we continue to devote much effort and resources into ventures that afford us greater long-term opportunities and address issues hindering our country’s growth.
This is clear, too, in our approach to social development.
Our thrust has always been to go beyond mere giving, and instead find sustainable ways to enable marginalized sectors to participate in, and contribute to growth.
Vital to our vision of the future is the creation of new economic centers throughout the country, away from big cities and into rural Philippines.
We continue to evolve in the way we approach issues that impact not just our businesses but society as a whole.
More and more, the lines that once separated our business concerns with our social and environment commitments are becoming less distinct, giving way to clearer sustainability goals.
In this regard, we are glad to report significant wins in the area of environmental sustainability.
Water initiative
Our water initiative, “Project 20x2025: Water for All,” which will see us cut operational water use by 50 percent by year 2025, achieved a landmark reduction in 2018. What makes this milestone truly special is that we’ve exceeded our target of 20 percent reduction by 2020 a full two years ahead of schedule.
sustainability
Also in 2018, we rolled out the next leg of our sustainability program – addressing solid waste pollution. With the help of various stakeholders, we aim to make a difference across three important fronts.
Our first project is a partnership with a host community to build a local recycling and sorting facility. Plastics will be broken down to become either feedstock or input to other materials that can be used in construction.
Our second initiative is the construction of the Philippines’ firstever recycled plastics roads. Hard-to-find recycle plastics will be converted into raw material for asphalt, which can then be used for road construction.
The project will help take plastic wastes out of our environment. We will be working with materials science firm Dow Chemicals to pilottest this technology in select areas.
Our third major initiative is an investment of P1 billion for five years to dredge and revive the 59.24-kilometer Tullahan River, which starts at the La Mesa Reservoir, spans Valenzuela and Malabon cities, and drains into the Manila Bay.
For decades now, we have been helping the local government clean up this major tributary, considered biologically dead because of pollution.
With the full backing of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, we are determined to clean up Tullahan River in support of the government’s project to rehabilitate the Manila Bay.
We’re aligning our many ongoing projects to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and we’re proud to say that in much of what we’ve done, sustainability has always been embedded in our operations.