Environmental Stewardship

2023 Progress: We reached our goal to have community action plans at all our facilities. This signature effort provides each facility with a site-specific plan for engaging the community, ensuring that we undertake appropriate environmental initiatives, respond to inquiries, and share best practices and learnings across our footprint of facilities. 

2023 Progress: Our EMS program is currently in place at nine sites and we look forward to continuing implementation in 2024.

2023 Progress: Covia’s efforts toward its goal of reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas on a per-ton basis focused on developing a framework and foundation for the future. Our comprehensive GHG Roadmap was developed to chart a path forward for reducing emissions intensity across our operations.

We also conducted a comprehensive Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) scenario analysis to better understand future challenges and opportunities related to climate change. 

Finally, we restructured our GHG Steering Team to align with the four key categories of emissions reductions identified in our GHG Roadmap. This included establishing four new project teams, each dedicated to one of the emissions reduction categories, along with appointing leaders at the overarching GHG Steering Team level to enhance strategic oversight.

2023 Progress: We have advanced water recycling to this degree at half of our facilities located in water-stressed regions.

• Crane, Texas, recycled 96% of their operational water.
• Kermit, Texas, recycled 90% of their operational water.

In addition, we successfully expanded our water reporting capabilities this year. All Covia facilities in water-stressed areas are now equipped to provide comprehensive water usage data allowing for greater transparency and supporting our water management and conservation efforts.

2023 Progress: At the end of 2023, our ratio of land rehabilitated to land disturbed was 1:6, compared to 1:25 in 2022. Our significantly improved performance in 2023 was due to increased land reclamation investment at our active sites, most notably at our Menomonie, Wisconsin, and the Ahuazotepec, Puebla, Mexico, facilities.

While the reclamation goal revolves around active sites, we remain committed to investing in our idled sites. In 2023, we successfully reclaimed over 120 acres at our operations in Grand Haven, Michigan, and Shakopee, Minnesota.

2023 Progress: Across our network, we now have a total of 20 sites certified by Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC), bringing our percentage up to 42%. The Biodiversity Conservation Steering Team has identified two additional sites that will begin the WHC certification process to help us achieve our goal of 50% by 2030.

Additionally, in 2023, we piloted our formalized Conservation Framework at our Emmett, Idaho, site. The successes and findings here will be used to roll out this initiative to each individual site in future years.

2023 Progress: We partnered with a third-party consultant to develop SAR Management Plans for all sites. The plans were completed at five sites, with implementation planned at the remaining sites over the next several years.