Transforming plastic waste through advanced recycling

View our content index to understand how the topics in our Sustainability Report and associated Sustainability section of our website provide information associated with the framework or guidance identified.

The Sustainability section of our website summarizes ExxonMobil’s approach to managing our operations and describes our ESG performance. The results of our topic selection process helped determine the key topics discussed in the Sustainability section of our website.

Energy and human development are inextricably linked.  Access to affordable and reliable energy has brought enormous progress, enabling people to live longer, healthier lives. Yet billions still do not have reliable access to clean cooking fuel or electricity. As growing populations gain access to energy and increase their living standards, they will create the largest expansion of the global middle class in history. That means more demand for homes, transportation, electricity, consumer goods and the energy to power them.

ExxonMobil’s Advancing Climate Solutions Progress Report outlines the company’s approach to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in support of a net-zero future.

Access the full Advancing Climate Solutions 2023 Progress Report, including important cautionary statements. 

Safety is a core value and an integral part of our culture. Process Safety focuses on managing the hazards that can be created from the vast equipment and complex processes that are essential to our business. The primary purpose is to keep hydrocarbons, chemicals and process water controlled and safely managed at all times through all phases of our operations.  Process safety events can potentially impact the workforce, the community and the environment. Because of this, we set high expectations for ourselves. Everyone involved in our operations plays a role in driving process safety excellence. We are now in the fourth year of a corporate-wide Process Safety initiative. From 2016 through 2021, we achieved a 31% reduction in Tier 1 process safety events (those of greatest consequence) with further improvement steps underway. 

Everyone at ExxonMobil plays a role in reducing operational waste. Our “waste mitigation hierarchy” prioritizes waste avoidance when feasible and when waste is unavoidable, we work to reduce, recover or reuse it whenever possible. We aim to dispose of waste only if other options have been exhausted and we have robust processes to select waste sites that meet our high standards and expectations. Our global network of lubricants blending and packaging plants have a Zero Waste to Landfill Silver validation from Underwriters Laboratories (UL).  We were the first petroleum products company to receive this status by diverting over 90% of waste produced in our global plant network from local landfills.

We value water as an essential resource for human development and for the support of the world’s ecosystem. That is why ExxonMobil works to manage water resources used in our operations, in a manner that helps protect human health and the environment. We strive to be a leader in safeguarding water resources and we try to understand water stress at the local level, as well as the potential impact of our operations. We also endeavor to integrate this understanding into our project design and operational practices.

The way we manage land and habitats, and their effect on biodiversity, is critical to the communities in which we operate. ExxonMobil works to mitigate potential impacts to ecosystems and the value those ecosystems provide. In new projects and ongoing operations, we build land and habitat management plans featuring protective measures specific to the location and scale of operations.

Managing long-term risks associated with climate change is a key part of managing strategic risks.