Climate action

At Eaton, our vision is to improve the quality of life and the environment through the use of our power management technologies and services. And we live this vision by being active stewards of our environment, whether it's creating innovative products for our customers to help them use power more efficiently or reducing the carbon footprint of our operations and encouraging our suppliers to do the same.

Our most recently publicly available data are provided in the table below:

Improving the environment and environmental stewardship

We are dedicated to reducing our environmental impacts and using natural resources efficiently. We demonstrate environmental stewardship by asking all employees to take an active role in conserving resources, working efficiently and improving our communities. We strive to reduce our energy, emissions, water and waste footprints, and are continuously working to improve our performance.

We are heeding the global call for nations and businesses to work together to address climate change. In addition to increasing our focus on positive impact products that are accounted for in Scope 3 (indirect) emissions in our inventory, we are working hard to decrease the carbon impacts from our own operations – known as Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) GHG emissions. 

As part of our efforts to avoid the most significant impacts of climate change, in 2017 we analysed our Scope 1 and 2 emissions against a 2 degrees Celsius scenario and evaluated options to address those emissions. We learned a great deal about what it would take to align our emissions reductions with science-based levels, and we understand that we will need to both reduce our energy demand and green our energy supply.

Our emissions reduction efforts include the following:

• Improving the energy efficiency of our buildings and manufacturing processes and emphasising energy conservation by employees, including:
  • Compressed air system maintenance
  • Boiler upgrades
  • Lighting retrofits
  • HVAC replacements
  • Installation of more efficient motors, drives and pumps
  • Process improvements
• Using distributed generation at our sites:
  • Our manufacturing sites produced more than 9 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy in 2018
  • Three of our sites have microgrids, with more in development 
• Purchasing renewable energy:
  • Several of our sites purchased green power from providers in 2018, and we plan to purchase even more in 2019

Measuring and reporting on progress

Our leadership set an absolute goal of a 20 per cent reduction (from a 2015 baseline) of our Scope 1 and 2 totals by 2025. Since 2015, we have reduced our absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6 per cent. For 2018, our absolute reduction target was 2 per cent, and we exceeded this goal by achieving an absolute reduction of 5.6 per cent.

We expanded the scope of our GHG inventory in 2018 to capture smaller sources of emissions, shifted to calendar-year accounting and updated our methodology. Those changes triggered a recalculation of our 2015 baseline. For consistency, we also recalculated the intervening years. Based on these changes, our 2018 total Scope 1 and 2 (market-based) GHG emissions are 1,099,044 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e). And our recalculated 2015 Scope 1 and 2 emissions (baseline) are 1,272,709 metric tons of CO₂e. This results in a 13.6 per cent reduction in our absolute emissions between 2015 and 2018. Our Scope 3 emissions remain unchanged from 2015 at 67,455,149 metric tons of CO₂e.

CDP responses

Since 2006, we have responded to the CDP Climate Change questionnaire and consistently received high marks for disclosure. CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, is a non-profit organisation whose website is the largest public repository of corporate GHG emissions data in the world. We also encourage our suppliers to report their emissions through the CDP Supply Chain Programme. Our most recent publicly available submittals are provided below.