Toward a more sustainable future
In 2011, the TELUS team remained committed to reducing the overall environmental impact of our domestic and international operations. It was another successful year, which saw many of our sustainability plans realized.
- Our energy management program was initiated with a number of projects being successfully launched, aimed at reducing energy waste and improving efficiency across our organization
- We made further progress toward our goal of having our operations aligned with the ISO 14001:2004 environmental management system (EMS) standard
- We continued to reduce our footprint with another year of paper printing reductions and a switch to 30 per cent post consumer recycled office print paper content
- Our telephone and video conferencing technologies continued to provide customers and team members with solutions for minimizing their environmental footprint
- The development plans continued for our TELUS Garden project, which will set the new bar for sustainability, including Canada’s first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum office building based on the new 2009 standards as well as a residential tower built to LEED Gold standards.
In 2012, TELUS is also investing in two new intelligent Internet Data Centres in Rimouski, Quebec and Kamloops, B.C., which are being built to LEED gold standards. They will be a cornerstone of TELUS’ ongoing support of secure cloud-based services for Canadian consumers and businesses.
Our disclosure aligns to the Global Reporting Initiative A+ level. We have also been recognized as either a World or North American leader on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the past decade and we have been twice named a Carbon Disclosure Leader by the Carbon Disclosure Project.
Looking forward to 2012 and beyond we will continue to focus on making incremental but substantive improvements toward meeting our ambitious year-over-year energy use and carbon reduction targets. This includes enhanced governance tools with climate change targets tied to CEO performance objectives and enhanced risk management plans as part of our climate change adaptation component. Additionally, we will continue to focus on making value-added improvements to our environmental management system, striving for full alignment of our individual environmental programs with the ISO 14001:2004 standard.