SMITHFIELD, Va. – Last week, Smithfield Foods Inc. honored several of its facilities and employees during the company's annual Environmental Excellence Awards banquet. Implementing these projects resulted in significant resource reductions, such as savings of 128 million gallons of water and 17 million kilowatts of electricity in 2011.

Combined, these projects resulted in an annual cost savings of more than $13 million, requiring capital expenditures of only $5 million.


One President's Award and 10 Environmental Excellence Awards were presented in a wide range of project categories representing Smithfield Foods' strong commitment to sustainability: outreach, energy and water conservation, wastewater handling and treatment, cleaner/greener production processes and/or packaging, waste reduction - pollution prevention, and best recycling of a previous year's project, the company relayed.

Two employees of Smithfield's hog production subsidiary, Murphy-Brown, LLC, received the President's Award. Both produced a video series entitled "Taking the Mystery Out of Pork Production." As the first publicly available footage of its kind in the pork industry, the documentary series (www.takingoutthemystery.com) provides an inside view of the pork production process – from farrow to finish. This series has nearly 25,000 views to date, and was awarded two Telly Awards this past year.

In total, 168 projects were submitted.

"These accomplishments reflect our employees' commitment to our proactive corporate social responsibility program that is working at every level of our company," said Bill Gill, assistant vice president for environmental affairs.