Our Environmental Management Systems (EMS, which follows ISO14001), Enterprise Risk Management framework and Whistleblowing mechanism are in place to ensure compliance with the relevant requirements and manage environmental risks. In 2019, we have 16 mills certified against ISO 14001 standard. We aim to certify our 25 mills by end 2020.
Our Sustainable Agriculture Policy commits us to improving our processes to improve our energy use efficiency and reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Besides mitigating climate change, improving our process efficiency also leads to lower costs. Our sustainability team continues working with colleagues from Indofood Group to focus on best management practices.
We have 11 energy managers and 5 energy auditors across Lonsum’s facilities. As 99% of fuel used in mills is already from renewable products, we focused our initiatives on increasing the percentage of renewable fuel used in our factories.
From the success stories and achievements of our palm oil operations, we adopted these best practices in our other crop operations. We are pleased to report that two rubber factories, one tea factory, and one cocoa factory are using renewable energy from palm shells.
The energy consumption per tonne of FFB processed at our mills in 2019 decreased by 7% to 1.96 GJ/tonne from 2.10 GJ/tonne in 2018. Energy consumption per tonne of rubber produced in our rubber factories decreased by 5% from 25.95 GJ/tonne in 2018 to 24.77 GJ/tonne in 2019.
Our primary GHG emissions (44.9%) are from peat emissions. These emissions are not a result of the disturbance of peat, but from its naturally occurring, lowlevel methane emissions. As most of the estates included in the scope are planted mostly in peat, peat now accounts for the majority of our GHG emissions.
In addition to land conversion, which accounted for 19.6% of our emissions, other sources of GHG emissions are methane from Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME), fuel usage in our mills and in the transport of FFB, chemical usage in mills and plantations, and nitrous oxide emission from fertilisers.
Total emissions in 2019 for each tonne of palm product were 1.05 tonnes of CO2e, a 10% decrease from 1.16 tonnes of CO2e per tonne of palm product in 2018. Our three aerated bunker composters continue to reduce methane emissions by 30%-70% compared with standard composting.
Water consumption is managed carefully at our oil palm and rubber operational sites. Our rubber and oil palm estates in tropical Indonesia are entirely watered by seasonal rainfall. 88% of mill water is from rivers; 85% of water used in our refineries is from municipal sources while groundwater is 15%; 91% of water used in our rubber factories is from rivers, the rest is from groundwater.
All our sites passed the compulsory Environmental Impact Assessments (locally known as ‘Analisis Dampak Lingkungan’ or ‘AMDAL’) during their development. Water sources that are important to sustain local biodiversity and surrounding communities were identified under the HCV assessments (please refer to page 31 for more information).
Demand for palm oil continues to grow globally, but oil palm is an efficient and high-yielding crop. We continue our efforts to maximise that yield at nucleus and plasma plantations and with independent smallholders.
Whilst we administer fertiliser during planting and replanting we also use leguminous cover crops to manage atmospheric nitrogen and improve the soil. We also recycle empty fruit branches (EFB) and POME for use as a soil improver. 90% of total volume fertiliser used is organic.
We have stopped the use of Paraquat since the end of March 2018 in all of our operations. Lonsum complies with government regulations (Komite Pestisida) on restricted pesticides.