AT&T Forms Sustainability Advisory Council

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ATT chartFresh off hiring an energy director to help it reduce its carbon footprint, AT&T now is moving ahead with the creation of a sustainability advisory council.

The new business advisory council will be comprised of AT&T staff, as well as third parties including the Carbon Disclosure Project, Cisco Systems, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the University of Colorado Denver, and University of Texas at Austin, according to a press release.

On Dec. 1, AT&T hired John Schinter as its Director of Energy, according to a press release.

The new advisory council will help AT&T improve its metrics, methodologies and technology used toward improving sustainability of its operations, products and services.

The council will build upon the findings of the SMART 2020 report developed by The Climate Group and the Global eSustainability Initiative. The effort tabbed information communications technologies as being capable of helping reduce CO2e emissions up to 15 percent a year worldwide by 2020.

In conjunction with the advisory council announcement, AT&T has released a white paper, "Networking for Sustainability: the Network Offset Effect (PDF)."

The white paper explores how companies can reduce emissions and energy use by migrating their computing power onto a network.

A hypothetical scenario in the white paper, which assumes certain in-service numbers, percentage usage, and travel avoidance enabled by AT&T's teleconferencing and telecommuting services, shows CO2e savings of 1.34 million metric tons a year.

In the travel model, by teleconferencing instead of traveling by air, about 5 metric tons of CO2 equivalent can be saved per teleconference attendee, assuming 15,000 trips per year. (See chart).

Environment + Energy Leader