Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability
Workplace Sustainability
Promoting workplace sustainability is a prerequisite of sound environmental policy and a necessary complement to our core business activities.
In all that we do, we strive to find sustainable solutions that make business sense and minimize our impact on the environment - whether we are retrofitting an existing building in Beijing, buying servers for a data center in London or executing a contract for waste disposal services in New York.
Since the release of the Environmental Policy Framework in 2005, we have focused on three operational priorities with the following successes in 2010:
1.
Maximizing the use of universal green building standards in the construction of new and existing offices.
All building projects include measures to enhance energy efficiency, reduce water consumption and the use of raw materials, and promote a healthy indoor environment, where applicable.
We have now become one of the world’s largest owners of LEED-certified commercial real estate, occupying 3.8 million square feet in green buildings under the new construction and commercial interiors rating systems.
We are in the planning and development stages of an additional 1.2 million square feet of LEED-certified real estate, amounting to a $3.3 billion investment in LEED-certified office space.
2.
Promoting energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint through facility consolidation as well as HVAC, lighting, and computing technology optimization in both our office buildings and data centers. Specifically, we have improved energy efficiency across our facilities through the following initiatives:
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Optimized lighting by introducing LED technology - Resulted in an annual carbon savings of 258 metric tons in our Asia offices alone
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Virtualized our desktop infrastructure, enabling the usage of low-wattage desktop PCs - Resulted in a 60% workplace technology energy reduction since 2006
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Introduced a low power “sleep mode” for personal desktops when not in use - Resulted in a daily savings of 5.5 MWh since 2010 with savings projected to double in 2011
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Consolidated four data centers into a single new, purpose-built, high-efficiency data center - Resulted in a 12% increase in operational efficiency and helped achieve a net year over year reduction in electric consumption and carbon emissions.
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Reduced average power consumption per computing server host in our North American data centers by 42% while increasing computing capacity by more than 60% over the last 5 years.
We continue to improve power and cooling efficiency in our data centers to drive down the energy required to cool computing equipment which is a significant component of data center energy consumption. Our approach to this includes:
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Optimizing our existing chilled-water air conditioning systems by upgrading to variable speed fan motors
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Implementing hot/cold aisle containment
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Expanding our temperature and humidity envelope to accept higher server-inlet temperatures
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Evaluating modular data center offerings that can provide significantly higher cooling energy efficiency and reduced operational costs
3.
Responsibly managing waste and maximizing the procurement of sustainable goods and services.
We diverted 50% of the firm’s global business waste from landfills around the world through recycling, composting and waste-to-energy initiatives. Our accomplishments include:
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Generating 160 megawatt hours of clean renewable electricity from 322 tons of wet trash
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Increasing food waste composting from 15.7 tons to 247 tons
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Partnering with our vendors in New York and New Jersey to convert 51% of food service items to compostable alternatives
In construction projects, we reduced waste diverted to landfills by over 2,700 tons; 88% of construction waste, including 100% of construction related paper and cardboard was recycled.
Paper use was further reduced by 20% and 79% of our paper was certified as sustainable by independent third-party agencies, such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Firmwide policies encouraging the use of hybrid and fuel-efficient vehicles in connection with corporate travel resulted in a 20% increase in the use of such vehicles.
For more information on our efforts to minimize our operational impacts, read our Summary of 2010 Environmental Initiatives.