TEAMING UP TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Cintas has been on a journey driven by our desire to be a socially and environmentally responsible company for many years. In early FY’22, Cintas announced its ambition to achieve Net Zero GHG emissions by 2050. Since then, and throughout the 2022 calendar year, we’ve been hard at work building an enterprise-wide environmental impact strategy.
Our new Cintas ESG branding was developed to help raise awareness and interest about our ESG efforts, and to bring consistency and cohesion to our ESG related initiatives. Using the theme “A Shared Drive for Better,” our ESG brand brings into focus the collective impact Cintas can make as we work together to create a more sustainable future for all. Our ESG Vision articulates our ambitions in this area: Guided by our principles, we work together to provide businesses with the sustainable products, services, and solutions they need for a better workday, supporting our partners and the communities we serve, building a better future. The brand’s visual identity features a “water leaf” in the logo with three distinct colors that are connected to our three ESG pillars. Using the water leaf as our logo helps to clearly impart the importance of the environment, and specifically water stewardship, in our ESG Journey. We expect to do our part to help sustain the world we live in, build on our culture of respect, belonging, and inclusion, and hold ourselves accountable with world-class business practices. It’s our SHARED DRIVE FOR BETTER.
Since forming the role of Vice President of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Chief Compliance Officer in September 2022, the newly created ESG team works with business and functional leaders across our company to develop and enhance our ESG strategies. The group also works side by side with other employee-partners to help educate and raise awareness about these initiatives and how they complement and support Cintas’ broader ambitions. In FY’22, Cintas also formed a new cross-functional ESG working group of executive leaders and subject matter experts—the PACE Team (Partners for A Cleaner Environment) —to not only support existing environmental sustainability initiatives and related goals, but to also identify and develop potential strategies to drive our ESG ambitions further.
Historically, our efforts to reduce our environmental footprint in our production facilities grew from our positive discontent and the implementation of more efficient practices throughout our operations. We have steadily reduced our impact on the environment simply by doing what we do best: challenging the status quo and pushing toward greater efficiencies.
Throughout the 2022 calendar year, we:
- Created and implemented an enterprise-wide ESG governance structure that brings together experience and perspective from across the organization
- Developed and launched Cintas ESG branding and our ongoing ESG awareness and education campaign, A Shared Drive for Better
- Implemented an improved process of gathering and reporting annual ESG-related data
- Reconfirmed FY’19 as our base reporting year
- Expanded our emissions and energy reporting to provide a full accounting of our locations throughout the United States and Canada (including our Canadian facilities and fleet), as well as our non-processing Rental, First Aid & Safety, Fire Protection, distribution, and corporate facilities
- Developed an accounting of our Scope 3 emissions using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s standardized global framework
- Deployed the first group of cars in our electric vehicle pilot program
- Continued our LED lighting conversion project in our largest and newest facilities
- Began construction of our first solar installation at our Piscataway, New Jersey, location