Mobilizing a More Sustainable World
By Charlene Lake, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs and Chief Sustainability Officer
Our world is built on connections, with each other, with information, with entertainment. At work, at home and in our cars, we are continuously connected, increasingly mobile and constantly building new networks. We’re driven to mobilize every aspect of this world to make it work even better for you. And as we do so, we look for ways our voice, our expertise, and our technology can help find answers to some of our society’s challenging problems.
For instance, we’re more committed than ever to working with educators, nonprofits and entrepreneurs to improve learning opportunities for students and make them a success in school and ready for careers. Together with Environmental Defense Fund, we’ve developed a toolkit that could save businesses 28 billion gallons of water annually if scaled across U.S. commercial buildings. We drive responsibly as well; with one of the largest commercial fleets in the U.S., we have more than 8,000 alternative-fuel vehicles deployed, helping us avoid using 12.4 million gallons of gasoline since 2009. And we continue to advocate passionately about the perils of texting while driving.
At the same time, we know we need to do more. This year, we hope to better demonstrate the ways in which our network, products and services can have real impact on conserving precious natural resources. We continue to test new ways to encourage consumers to recycle their phones, which increases in importance as the pace of innovation continues to quicken. And we’re working closely with our supply chain to encourage other companies to improve their social and environmental performance, and track the impact we’re all having on carbon emissions.
These initiatives and many others noted in our AT&T 2013 Annual Sustainability Update are only half of the equation, though. The other half is you. If we aren’t meeting your expectations for how we report on our interaction with society, then we aren’t doing our job.
We want to hear from you — think of this as a friend request. Meet and interact with some of the people inside AT&T working on these issues. Keep up with our blog, where we provide frequent updates on our activities. Dive deeper into the policies, programs, goals and data that govern our work. And tell us how we can enable you in your sustainability journey. We freshened up our website, People │ Planet │ Possibilities, to make it easier for you to learn and comment on our work with communities, how we tackle environmental challenges, and how we collaborate to address our world’s pressing social and environmental issues.
Long gone is the one-way, 100+ page annual sustainability report we used to print. The value of our technology is that we have more opportunities to engage in a dialog with you, and that’s what we want to do with our reporting. We hope it’s more up-to-date, engaging and tailored to what our various readers want, whether you are a customer, investor, policy maker or non-governmental organization.
Our success as a business is connected to the health of our society. Our ability to develop sustainable business practices is connected to the ideas and feedback we receive from you, our customers and partners. We’d love to have you in our social network. Please visit www.att.com/csr and tell us what’s important to you and join the conversation on Twitter with #ATTimpact.
