The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection recently announced that Verizon is the recipient of the department’s 2011 Recycling Award for its efforts to promote recycling in the company and within the communities it serves.
Verizon received the award at the Association of New Jersey Recyclers 31st annual Recycling Symposium and Awards Luncheon at the Jumping Brook Country Club in Neptune.
“At Verizon, our goal is to conduct our business in an environmentally responsible way and to educate our employees about how they can protect the environment and the communities that we serve,” said Jim Gowen, Verizon’s chief sustainability officer. “We are proud to be recognized for our recycling efforts, and we hope to set an example for other businesses on what they can do to implement their own sustainability initiatives.”
Verizon’s recycling program has grown significantly over the years. During 2010, the company recycled more than 50.6 million pounds of paper and cardboard. Verizon has examined ways to reduce cardboard and paper use, such as using reusable totes, using paper and boxes with higher recycled content and partnering with key suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of their products
The company has a “green team” of more than 5,500 employees corporate-wide involved with sustainability initiatives and has conducted electronics recycling events at Verizon locations across the country offering free recycling of old electronics for the community, including an event in May at Verizon’s corporate center in Basking Ridge. To date, more than 250,000 pounds of electronics have been collected from the events.
Earlier this year, Verizon’s sustainability team developed a new carbon-intensity metric to measure carbon efficiency, enabling the company to accurately quantify, for the first time, the impact of all its green initiatives. The metric shows how much CO2 emissions result from moving a single terabyte of information across Verizon’s network. Using this metric, Verizon improved its carbon efficiency by 15 percent in 2010 versus 2009 and is committed to improving by an additional 15 percent in 2011.
In the last year, Verizon also:
- Deployed an additional 1,642 alternative-fuel vehicles, moving closer to Verizon’s goal of making such vehicles 15 percent of the company’s fleet by 2015.
- Teamed with Cisco and Motorola to introduce four ENERGY STAR-certified set-top boxes for Verizon’s FiOS TV customers.
- Launched three green mobile devices – including the world’s first certified carbon-free smartphone, the Motorola CITRUS.
Verizon is planning nearly 20 events across the country to celebrate America Recycles Day on Nov. 15.
