BD strives to reduce energy use to reduce costs and the environmental impacts associated with producing and using energy, including greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007, BD formed a North American Energy Team to focus efforts on energy efficient facilities and to foster collaboration on energy best practices. The charts below show the total amount of energy BD purchased and self-generated worldwide. Self-generated energy is a result of cogeneration systems, which produce electricity plus either steam or hot water for site operations using one fuel (typically natural gas), thereby greatly increasing fuel efficiency and decreasing the site’s use of purchased electricity. From fiscal years 2003 to 2006, BD’s absolute energy use decreased 6.0 percent. When normalized to the Cost of Products Sold, BD’s energy use has decreased 24 percent per dollar of product cost.

In this report, BD has chosen to report environmental performance measurements in both absolute and normalized terms. By normalizing our environmental performance data we are able to account for increases and decreases in production over time. Due to the diversity of our products, normalizing our data based upon units of production at a worldwide level would not provide a meaningful reference. We have instead used Cost of Products Sold, as published in the BD Annual Report each year.

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Carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) are the three primary greenhouse gases. The other key greenhouse gases – HFCs, perfluorocarbons (PFCs), or sulphur hexafluoride (SF6s) – are not used or emitted by BD. Increased emissions of greenhouse gases increase the heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, with potentially serious consequences. BD calculates CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O emissions based on our fuel and electricity use, using protocol from the “Climate Leaders Greenhouse Gas Inventory Protocol Core Module Guidance for Direct and Indirect Emissions from Stationary Combustion Sources.”

For calendar year 2006, our greenhouse gas emissions included approximately 465,000 metric tons of CO₂, 9 metric tons of CH₄ and 7 metric tons of N₂O. From calendar year 2003 to 2006, total absolute greenhouse gas emissions increased 5.2 percent, while normalized greenhouse gas emissions decreased 14.3 percent. The slight increase from 2005 to 2006 was due to several expansions at our manufacturing sites throughout the world. BD is able to control our normalized emissions of CO₂ because of continued attention to energy efficiency at our manufacturing sites.

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