Verizon Charts a new Carbon Intensity Metric

Verizon has a carbon intensity metric to quantify its energy efficiency in moving a terabyte of data across its global backbone. The new measurement, which was developed by Verizon's Sustainability Office and tested over the past 12 months, showed an improvement of approximately 15 percent in the company's carbon efficiency, from 2009 to 2010. Verizon is aiming for a further 15 percent improvement in 2011.



The metric is derived by first combining Verizon's total carbon emissions (in metric tons) from the electricity, building fuels and vehicle fuels used to run the company's business. Then, that total is divided by the number of terabytes of data that the company transports across its network. (One terabyte equals about 300 feature-length movies.) Verizon transported 78.6 million terabytes across its global network in 2010 – an increase of about 16 percent, compared with 2009.



Verizon said this metric will help it to better assess the success of its sustainability efforts and where it needs to focus more attention to continue improving.



"We want to make sure our sustainability claims are backed up by solid methodology and numbers that we can share with everyone," said James Gowen, chief sustainability officer for Verizon. "We developed this metric because we are a network company, and our core measure is the amount of information we transport on our network. So this ratio is closely aligned with our business and will allow us to assess how we are becoming more energy efficient even as our business expands."http://www.verizon.com