Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility strategy prioritizes the issues that are most important to our business and to our stakeholders, identified through a formal CSR materiality assessment. We use the Cisco CSR Report to communicate our approach, objectives, progress, and challenges around five high-level priorities. This morning, we’ll focus on the Environment:
Over the years, Cisco has built strong relationships with key global advocacy organizations and established credibility with customers who want to use Cisco solutions to improve their own environmental sustainability. Our two most important environment-related issues are energy consumption/greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and product end of life, as explained by Kathy Mulvany and Darrel Stickler in the video below:
Randy Pond, Cisco’s Senior Vice President of Operations, shared how the company’s emphasis on environmental performance is helping to improve the business and Cisco’s reputation among industry leaders:
“We’ve found strong environmental performance and reputation enhances customer loyalty, strengthens strategic relationships with governments, and helps attract the best employee talent.”
Cisco continues to address the energy and GHG emissions from its operations, supply chain, and products through a number of different objectives, such as setting a second five-year goal to reduce operational Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 40% by 2017. We also encourage our suppliers to report to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and offer our customers Cisco solutions that help reduce energy consumption from IT equipment, buildings, business travel, and employee commuting. In FY15, Cisco achieved a number of goals to improve energy performance, including:
- Cisco tied for #1 across all sectors on CDP’s 2014 investor carbon questionnaire. We maintained our membership on CDP’s Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI) for the seventh year in a row and on the Carbon Performance Leadership Index (CPLI) for four of the last five years.
- Customers returned 11,718 metric tonne of Cisco products for reuse and recycling, and we reused over US$365 million in Cisco equipment.
- Cisco spent US$16 million on energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives as part of our global EnergyOps Program.
- 71.9 percent of our global electricity came from renewable sources, exceeding our 25-percent goal
for the year.
In FY16, we will continue to focus on our energy and GHG and product end of life priority areas in a number of different ways. This includes improvements in product energy efficiency, energy in business operations, product takeback, and supply chain GHG emissions reductions.
To read the full report and learn more about Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility efforts, please visit csr.cisco.com
Together we can make a difference!