America’s Greenest Companies
From Office Dept to Accenture, these are the most earth-friendly companies in the U.S.
Ronda Churchill, Bloomberg New / Getty Images
Industry Sector: Technology Equipment
NEWSWEEK Green Score: 71.6%
Environmental Impact: 66.4%
Environmental Management: 85.7%
Transparency & Disclosure: 32.1%
Recognizing that its IT services took up five data centers and wasted huge amounts of energy, EMC began its “Journey to the Cloud” to move to a virtualized IT infrastructure in 2004. In 2009, the company introduced a “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure” and all of the company’s desktops will be virtualized by 2012. These initiatives have reduced energy consumption by 34 percent and shrunk its carbon footprint by 100 million pounds of CO2. To reduce commuting, the company offers e-conferencing and the flexibility to work from home; the company also has a carpool matching service to encourage fewer drives to work. All this resulted in a 21 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from travel since 2007. EMC’s new buildings are all being designed with energy efficiency in mind and those already built are being retrofitted. The company plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and hopes to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2040.
Comments