Segundo Cargo: afectación al principio de confianza legítima

Reduces Its CO

Reliance

The Armour-Eckrich Meats plant in Junction City, Kansas, which produces approximately 100 million pounds of smoked sausage annually under the Eckrich, Butterball, John Morrell, and Healthy Ones brands, has found a way to reduce its reliance on carbon dioxide (CO2) by 33 percent.

That translates into an average savings of 38 tons every week.

“We inject CO2into our various sausage

blends to help cool them,” explains Powerhouse Supervisor Carl Lawson. “By installing a plate water chiller, we’re now cooling the city water we use in the blending process from 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit down to 35 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, we don’t need as much CO2.”

Elegant in its simplicity, the water chiller is composed of 23 stainless steel plates filled with liquid ammonia refrigerant. The temperature of incoming municipal water decreases just by flowing around the plates. “One of the great things about this system is that it is transferable to any facility that uses non-chilled water in its products and an external cooling source such as CO2,”

adds Plant Manager Adrian Mitchell. The decreased CO2use has yielded one

additional environmental benefit. The plant now receives one less delivery of the gas per week, eliminating any diesel fuel emissions the truck would have generated in the process.

* Contract farm NOV figures are based on reviews of state database information and surveys of production staff.

ENVIRONMENT t 30

Prior to 2006, many of our subsidiaries collected data independently and without centralized guidance or management. This created inconsistencies in reported metrics and made facility-to-facility comparisons difficult in past reports. For example, we have noted that our 2004 data show a company-wide jump in emissions and decline in efficiencies across several metrics, and the cause is not clear. Smithfield established uniform, automated protocols for environmental metric measurement and reporting in 2006 and rolled them out for use across the company in 2007. We have collected one full year of data using the new system, and continue to develop and improve our data-collection program. Even as we continue to explore ways to better capture and communicate environmental data, several factors, discussed below, affect the data and the significance of data trends.

Scope of Reporting

The scope of our reporting has expanded greatly over the past five years. This is due to improved data collection and company growth. For fiscal 2008 we report on 49 domestic processing plants and 467 farms, compared to 44 plants and 445 farms in fiscal 2007. Our expanded data sets now include Murphy-Brown’s Premium Standard Farms subsidiary as well as domestic processing facilities not included in previous reports.

One result is that the absolute data reported in this section of the report might be interpreted to suggest, erroneously, that we have increased resource use and emissions over time at the same facilities producing the same amount of finished product. In reality, this has resulted, for the most part, from the collection of additional data from existing facilities and from the addition of data from more recently acquired facilities (rather than the construction or start-up of entirely new facilities). Thus, we also report normalized data to better track our efficiency, which is a more accurate indicator and shows improvement in many performance areas. In this report, the following were not included in the scope of the data:

i _{Joint venture and contract farm energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, air emissions, and waste generation} i _{Contract businesses}

i _{Operations in which we hold a minority interest}

New Metrics

For this report, we have made a number of changes to improve our reporting and better align with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. This report includes the following for the first time:

i _{Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data from company-owned transportation} i _{Multiple years of GHG emissions data from domestic operations}

i _{Environmental protection expenditure and savings data for the past five years} i _{Environmental data from processing and farming operations in Poland and Romania}

Data from the international operations are reported in a separate section as they are intended to provide a baseline (since time series data is not available) and certain of the data are not directly comparable to the domestic data. We will continue expanding

the scope of our reporting in future reports to cover additional facilities and operations as our data management system matures. The numbers in the data charts have been rounded. Because percentage changes are calculated based on non-rounded values, they may vary from those calculated based on the rounded numbers.

Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Climate change, which has been linked by many scientists to GHG emissions, may have implications relative to water use, energy prices, weather patterns, and demand for consumer goods. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that carbon dioxide (CO2) released by fossil fuel combustion for power generation, vehicle and manufacturing emissions, and heating

is the primary greenhouse gas in the United States, representing approximately 85 percent of total GHG emissions. As in any industry, GHG emissions occur to some extent at various points in our operations.

i _{Our processing plants emit CO}2and nitrous oxide (N2O) (through energy use) and methane (CH4) (via wastewater treatment) i _{Our transportation activities result in CO}2emissions (due to fuel use)

i _{Our farms emit methane* and N}2O (from animal manure, treatment systems, and crop production) and CO2(due to energy use)

Because fossil fuel use and GHG emissions are linked, we report them together in this section. The data reported on the following pages account for more than 90 percent of our energy use. We are working toward developing a fuller carbon profile of Smithfield’s operations that will include all domestic and international processing facilities, our farming operations, and contributions from hog feed mills, and the transportation of feed, live animals, and food products. We anticipate a reduction in overall energy and GHG emissions next year, as the data will reflect the sale of our Beef Group in 2008.

Electricity Consumption [Reporting Facilities: Processing/49, Murphy-Brown/557, Premium Standard Farms/24]

In this year’s report, we include data from five additional processing plants. However, normalized data show that we have improved our energy efficiency, cutting energy use per 100 pounds of production by 5.6 percent this past year, and by 31 percent since 2004. In addition to pushing for greater efficiency at our processing facilities, our corporate information technology (IT) department has made an effort to reduce energy use in our office-based operations. Our Green IT Initiative includes a number of potential projects, all of which are inexpensive and effective ways to decrease our carbon footprint while cutting energy costs:

i _{Properly managing computer power usage} i _{Making double-sided printing the printer default}

i _{Raising data center thermostats by five degrees in summer}

i _{Virtualizing servers and replacing old equipment with Energy Star-rated devices} i _{Increasing use of WebEx, video conferencing, and telecommuting}

31 t ENVIRONMENT

John Morrell Plant Lowers