Environmental Sustainability

Nowadays climate change is one of the actual problems facing our planet. It is mainly caused by anthropogenic emissions of gases from burning fossil fuels, electricity, improp-er use of minerals and other factors. As a result, we have got our ecological situation worsened as the technological progress has grown. Of course, there exist a number of green organizations, trying to prevent damages made to our planet and promoting ecolog-ical use of materials. But in this report I aim to describe and analyze companies from envi-ronmental sustainability’s perspective.

It is very pleasant to know that some big companies are trying to affect on this ecological situation, reduce gases emission and electricity consumption, recycling. Furthermore, I

What does green ICT stand for? It is all about reducing the impact of technologies on the environment: minimise the energy use of computers, servers and data centers, buy more long-lasting equipment and concider it’s recycling. However, ICT is not just a problem, it is a also a solution of problems it has created.

The first environmental reports were published in the late 1980s in the field of chemistry, small and medium-sixed business (www.en.wikipedia.org). Today, the majority of biggest corporations in the world follow ecological regulations in order to keep themselves envi-ronmentally sustainable and report about it annually.

One of the good examples of how significant it is to be environmentally responsible is DuPont company, which carried out a 65% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over a 10-year period, netting the company billions of dollars every year through energy efficien-cy savings. In 2007, that savings were 2.2$ billion/a year, even though the total profit was less than 2 billion. Of course, the scales could be not so immense. The other good way to reduce expenses is to eliminate unnecessary space, material handling, rework, thus re-ducing materials wasted and the energy to process

Stern, Stern review on the economics of climate change, 2006), which is the reason why transport industry has been pressed more than any other sector. In recent years ma-jority of car manufacturers have set targets to reduce their impact on ecology. Early inte-gration of environmental concerns into daily operations (image 3) of Toyota has helped it to environmental leader in this field of industry and gain competitive advantage in many respects. This is proved by their hybrid technologies, most notable in Prius line (image 4, figure 2).

Image 4

From figure 1 it is evident that Toyota has been consistently reducing their total GHG (greenhouse) emissions by setting a target to reduce emissions per unit of sales by 20% by 2014. They actually delivered a 23% reduction from 2001 levels and a 51% - from 1990.(Toyota environmental report 2011, 2014)

Figure 1 Figure 2

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