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LES BUCKLEY: Sustainability for us has had a very financial focus - re-use, reduce, recycle. And increasingly it will take on a more marketing focus as consumers begin to understand the need for manufacturers and brand owners to have some responsibility for managing the environment.
The sustainability issues that we face in Singapore in particular, are those that are built around the lack of raw materials within the Singapore environment, for example water. We pay for every last millilitre of water that we use, and for us it's driving down the usage of water.
It's a matter of trying to minimise total energy usage to minimise cost. The challenge we face is getting modern consumers, more upmarket consumers to consider recycling because our traditional consumers are very happy to recycle because there's a financial benefit for them.
I think traceability is probably more important than sustainability. We've had a large number of worldwide concerns over food integrity. And I think that integrity of food supply for markets such as city states, Hong Kong, Singapore and for countries such as Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, which don't have a particularly strong local base for food and are sourcing their food and beverage from around the world, will become increasingly focused on the traceability and therefore the integrity of their food sources.
We measure our energy usage in megajoules rather than in dollars so we can actually reduce the total amount of energy that we use as well as the total cost of energy that we use. We're currently moving from oil to natural gas in terms of fuelling this particular brewery, and we'll be moving to other less costly and potentially more sustainable forms of energy. Not only are we saving money but we're also being good to the environment.
If New Zealand is a beacon to the rest of the world in terms of sustainability then I think New Zealand can become very important to the world. We've been important before, we can be increasingly important in the future to show the rest of the world how a western environment, a western economy can become sustainable.
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