Corporate Responsibility: Environmental Sustainability
EDS recognizes that an effective environmental framework includes a focus on our own operations. We are assessing our global energy usage, adopting sound environmental practices within our facilities and business operations, engaging our employees, partnering with others and transforming our supply chain to reduce our carbon footprint and leverage improvements for clients.
Baselining Our Environmental Impact
EDS is taking the following actions to baseline our environmental impact globally:
- In Australia and New Zealand, EDS has baselined energy usage, calculated carbon emissions and established a goal to reduce emissions by 25 percent through 2010. Actions include a videoconferencing investment targeting a 20 to 30 percent reduction in employees' domestic air travel and a carbon offset program pilot for employees.
- In the UK, EDS partnered with The Carbon Trust to survey energy usage in a sample of facilities and data centres. EDS also partnered with Enviros to conduct an environmental study of all UK facilities and operations and recommend an ongoing carbon management program.
- Globally, EDS is planning a study to define a worldwide baseline for emissions, resource usage and waste, with recommended targets and metrics for ongoing improvements.
Our Facilities
EDS is taking the following actions to reduce the environmental impact of our facilities around the world:
- Expanding recycling programs globally and engaging employee participation in EDS-owned and leased facilities
- Implementing energy-efficient designs and upgrades to our facilities, including lighting and HVAC systems and controls
- Adopting environmentally sound building standards for use in new and renovated facilities
- Consolidating facilities, where practical, to reduce our overall real estate footprint
- Pursuing opportunities to purchase a higher percentage of our electricity needs from eco-friendly generation sources (wind, solar, water, biomass, etc.)
- Seeking innovative ways to reduce water use and augment municipal water supplies with other sources for irrigation
- Renewing ISO 14001 environmental certification at designated facilities
EDS' world headquarters facility in Plano, Texas, uses innovative solutions to reduce its environmental impact:
- An aggressive recycling and waste-reduction program resulted in 95.5 tons of paper salvaged in 2006. Other materials are also recycled.
- An energy management system incorporates lighting sensors, high-efficiency lighting, fixed temperature controls and natural lighting via multiple atriums.
- Chillers are supplemented with an ice farm that creates ice at night when the power grid experiences lower demand, reducing power grid needs during the day. The ice is then used to cool the facilities during the day. No chemical refrigerant is used to air condition the building.
- A water reclamation system handles more than 300 million gallons annually to independently meet all irrigation needs.
- A landscaping program encourages using native plants that require less water and fewer pesticides.
- More than 200 tons of landscape waste was composted and diverted from the landfill in 2006.
Our Data Centers
EDS recognizes that the IT infrastructure and data centers we operate are heavy electricity consumers and that this consumption has an upstream impact on carbon emissions by way of electrical generation. The majority of this consumption is driven by the technologies currently available from computer hardware manufacturers and by requirements in meeting business commitments for our clients. EDS is aware there are significant opportunities to better manage these assets and to make facility design and operations improvements to maximize our overall efficiency. Refer to the Stewardship tab for more information.
Employee Engagement
EDS encourages employees to continually improve their personal environmental performance at work, at home and in their communities by providing ideas they can consider and actions they can take to reduce their environmental impact. Here are some ways we engage employees:
- Review environmental sustainability information on the EDS intranet
- Participate in local recycling programs
- Implement energy-efficient computing habits, including power management
- Calculate a personal carbon footprint
- Participate in carbon offset programs, either internally or externally
- Reduce environmental footprint at work, at home and while driving
- Engage in the community
In addition, EDS encourages employees to submit eco-friendly ideas that can benefit EDS and clients through its global Innovative Ideas Program. Ideas are evaluated by functional and regional representatives for further development and implementation.
Materials Used In Operations
As an IT services company, EDS is not a direct manufacturer of products and does not purchase any significant quantity of raw materials (for example, natural resources) for production processes. EDS does, however, consume copier paper, business supplies and computer hardware such as desktops, servers and mainframes.
When possible and consistent with business requirements, EDS purchases products such as copier paper and some administrative supplies manufactured in whole or in part from recycled materials.
Eco-friendly computing is at the heart of EDS' environmental sustainability initiatives. We are working with alliance partners, industry groups and other hardware equipment manufacturers to purchase and deploy energy-efficient desktops, laptops and servers and manage their operation in ways that benefit the environment.
EDS also takes our responsibility for environmentally conscious IT equipment disposal seriously. We use contracted disposal suppliers who follow federal, state and local regulations for IT equipment disposal and offer options such as internal placement, donation, employee gift, sales, disposal, and end-of-lease management and return. Internally, our brokering services organization uses these same methods for disposing of EDS equipment – a total of 62,388 items in 2006.
EDS' investment in supply chain transformation enables us to assess suppliers against environmentally sound procurement criteria and increase our ability to reduce consumption and conserve the global resource base. The ability to more precisely track material consumption facilitates EDS' ability to monitor material efficiency and the cost of material flows.