verizonnjcommunityupdate.com

Think of it as a ruler or tape measure for carbon footprints.

Verizon has developed a new metric that enables the company, for the first time, to accurately quantify the impact of all our sustainability initiatives.

The new measure — the carbon intensity metric — is derived by combining Verizon's carbon emissions from the electricity and fuels used to run the company's business and dividing that total by the terabytes of data transported across our global networks (one terabyte equals about 300 feature-length movies).

Although Verizon carried 78.6 million terabytes across our global network in 2010 — an increase of about 16 percent compared to 2009 — the carbon intensity metric showed an improvement of approximately 15 percent in the company's carbon efficiency over that time.

By one estimate from the Global eSustainability Initiative, smart use of broadband and ICT can reduce total U.S. carbon emissions by 22 percent and total U.S. oil imports by 36 percent by the year 2020. Verizon has experience that would help on all three fronts. Building and running big networks – data and phone – is what we’ve been doing for decades.