To be wasteful and to squander resources is a terrible thing. While our Sustainability Policy certainly tackles traditional waste, we also view waste differently - wasted talent, wasted opportunities, wasted time and wasted potential.

What is it that we have been doing to tackle waste of different kinds? Here’s some of our commitments:

• Through a collaborative team, BMMI launched an Employee Self Service in HR to empower our people, but also assist in preventing wasting our resources; whether it’s time, talent and very importantly paper! Imagine that over 11,262 transactions processed on average per year are now paperless!
• Our IMS department continues to set reduction targets and measures the volume of waste (paper, plastic and organic) diverted from landfill through recycling and recovery.
• Our zeal to serve the community is also reflected in our efforts to reduce food waste by strengthening our ties with Conserving Bounties, a social enterprise which specialises in providing meals to families and individuals in need in Bahrain. The team has worked together with the Bahraini organisation to collect bakery items and ready to eat meals close to expiry. Up to date, BMMI’s contribution accounted for over 70,000 meals.
• A very exciting initiative the team embarked on in collaboration with our Alosra supermarket is a plastic reduction journey. Alosra launched its first Plastic Bag Free Week on November 18, saving 95,000 bags from ending up in the landfill during the week. This is part of a bigger plan and is in line with Alosra’s goal to eliminate all its plastic carrier bags by 2020. Our mission is to sustainably remove all non-recyclable plastics and excess packaging within our control by 2025.
• Each one of us at BMMI work towards ensuring that no opportunities have been lost or wasted. This means providing equal opportunities for our colleagues at work and for supply chain vendors, as well opportunities for the communities in which we operate. We continue to equip the workplace to support diversity based on needs, such as providing parking spots for expectant mothers, creating a more flexible working environment for millennials, and leveraging the competencies of differently-abled individuals in the workplace. One major example of this is being the first business host for an Employment Facilitation Training Service (EFTS) programme which provides differently abled individuals to gain transferrable job skills through practical training. This year, the second batch of EFTS students are training with our BLS and Consumer teams!

To solidify our efforts, we will continue to seek opportunities to support or invest in areas related to our business such as: food, waste, health, entrepreneurship, and the environment, based on community needs. If you have any suggestions that will help strengthen our commitments, get in touch with our CSR and Corporate Communications Executive, Reem AlTajer on raltajer@bmmi.com.bh.