At the foundation of USA Distillers is respect for our customers, respect for our community, and respect for our environment. With this respect comes the responsibility to deliver quality, improve lives, and reduce environmental impact.
At USA Distillers we have always had a sense of responsibility to our customers, our community, and our environment. From the first day of operations we have been dedicated to producing the highest quality products, and we are still focused on this dedication. As we have grown, so has a new community in the Big Bend area with USA Distillers creating many job opportunities for local Swazis. As villages began to form, and residents of those villages joined the USA Distillers family, our company and the community became intimately intertwined and with this, a responsibility to our community has become paramount.
Over the years USA Distillers has embarked on many community based projects, and still today provides clean water to our community. This water has been treated in our state of the art water treatment plant to standards higher than those in municipal districts in most first world countries. We have donated to projects that have enhanced local schools to educate the children in our community, and provide funding for it to run. We have embarked on projects to empower local farmers to be part of our pioneering efforts to be the only producer of grain spirits in Southern Africa. We sponsor local sports teams as well as provide university scholarships so that young members of our community can better their lives. Some of these individuals have returned to our community and are part of the USA Distillers family. In the near future we hope to be supplying reliable electrical power to the local community and farmers at low cost.
As we continue to invest in delivering quality to our customers, and improving the lives in our community, we are also focused on reducing the impact we have on our environment. Technological projects such as our modern steam turbine generator allow us to operate at higher efficiencies. This means we use less energy to power our plant, and this reduces greenhouse gas emissions. We also use less water since we need less steam. However, our most significant environmental impact reduction project will be the introduction of an advanced bio-digester system. This system will allow us to treat our waste product and produce high quality fertilizer which we will provide to local farmers, and methane gas which we will use to power our boilers. This reduces our environmental impact to a fraction of what is typical for distilleries of our size. In anticipation of introducing bio-digester systems in our overall process, we have stored a large volume of our waste product to fuel the system. We anticipate the ability to run 100% coal free for more than 10 years when the digester system is completed in 2016. This will make us the most environmentally friendly, and cleanest alcohol distilling plants on the planet.