Today is my last post on greenroots as a Nortel employee, and the final post on greenroots. I will be moving over to Avaya as part of the soon to close Enterprise deal and continue working on green/sustainability business over there.

Thank you

The last week has been introspective for me, reflecting on all the people I have worked with at Nortel and the work that we have done. Pretty much universally, my colleagues here at Nortel have been wonderful, both personally and professionally. It has been such a pleasure working with people around the globe and I have been humbled by their intelligence and humanity.

On the work front, we have moved the Nortel green/sustainability program significantly forward over the last couple of years and have been leaders in a number of areas. I am truly amazed while reflecting on these last years when considering the expansion and consolidation of green activities with the company. One aspect of the program that has been so rewarding has been the cross functional and disparate areas of the company that have gotten involved, including IT, logistics, marketing, Design for Environment, EHS, Real Estate, Travel, Fleet, Employee Communication, Product Take-back/E-waste and Government Relations. That diversity of expertise has created new collaboration opportunities and exposed me to so many true experts within the company, for which I feel very fortunate. I am looking forward to those interactions and successes in my new job at Avaya.

Saw this article earlier this week from the New York Times, ‘Smart' Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt. This article details some criticism from earlier adopters/pilot customers from smart metering. These customers aren't seeing the immediate benefits from their new, snazzy, $250 dollar smart meters, and in fact some customers are seeing higher bills from their real time meters than they were seeing from monthly (or longer) manual readings.

Millions of households across America are taking a first step into the world of the "smart grid," as their power companies install meters that can tell them how much electricity they are using hour by hour - and sometimes, appliance by appliance. But not everyone is happy about it... Some consumers argue that the meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. And many find it unfair that they will begin to pay immediately for the new meters through higher rates, when the promised savings could be years away.

Saw this today, Commerce Takes Stab at Speeding Up Green Tech Patent Processing, and thought it was an example of really smart public policy. Here is an existing bottle neck in the movement towards a more efficient and greener economy and one that is apparently going to get a little wider over the next several months.

In effect the Patent office will be rolling out a pilot program where the first 3,000 green tech patent applications with the necessary documentation and petitions will receive and accelerated evaluation. This is projected to shave about a year off the review process, and that is year earlier that these innovations can enter the marketplace. "Patents for green technologies, such as Smart Grid innovations, typically take about 40 months for a final decision. The new program is expected to reduce the decision process by an average of one year - shortening the waiting time from a little over three years to a little over two years."

There is obviously a lot going on right now on the Climate Change front. I thought I would highlight a few of the most interesting article and developments that I have seen in the last couple of days.

• First, the COP15 conference in Copenhagen started today. One of the best resources our there for following the developments at the conference is the ClimateBiz Copenhagen Portal

COP15, formally known as the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, aims to set a new course for global climate policy, one that could impact every corner of the economy. Our coverage focuses on the business response to the Copenhagen event: How companies are planning for, engaging with, and responding to the negotiations. It includes firsthand reports from our reporters on the scene, as well as analysis from leading companies, activist groups, and thought leaders.

Maybe you have heard about this conference starting next week in Copenhagen? Over 60 world leaders are going to be attending and thousand upon thousand of government negotiators, corporate execs and climate change experts at the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference. It is going to be quite the event and one that I for one hope to see meaningful movement towards a truly global position on combating an issue that crosses all national borders.

In the tech sector there has been a lot of work and discussion about both decreasing our sectors direct impacts to climate change (mostly centered around energy use of equipment) and more importantly leveraging the possibility of technology to make the rest of society’s work more efficient (smart building/grid, logistics, and collaboration, for starters). For a more detailed study of this issue I refer to the excellent Smart2020 report, this report by The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), with independent analysis by McKinsey & Company came out last year.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to attend the launch of The Carbon Management and Offsetting Trends Survey Report 2009. The event was held at the spectacular showroom of the design firm Autodesk in downtown San Francisco, and this was a very cool place for an event because of the innovative and evocative manner that Autodesk showcases its work, from concert halls to hotrods.

My stance on offsets, which is unchanged from this event, is that the voluntary market is too fraught with uncertainty, and risk, to make it worthwhile to large multinational companies. I do believe that offsets can have value and in the right environment can be used effectively to reduce global carbon emissions, but I think this requires regulatory mechanisms to be robust enough to have impact. The best example are the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) offsets under Kyoto, but even some of these have run into issues.

I am pleased to announce that Nortel has very recently been recognized as a Brand Emission Leader. This designation comes from the project of the same name, the Brand Emissions Leaders Project. This project is a joint initiative of Marketing magazine, ENDS Carbon, and the University of Edinburgh Business School, which has undertaken this effort with the aim of developing a better understanding of the carbon performance of brands across the UK.

Overview

In 2009, the Brand Emissions Leaders Project rated the carbon performance of over 600 of the UK's leading brands.

The Project aims to provide an annual rating of the carbon performance of the leading brands operating in the UK. In 2009, it has ranked over 600 brands divided into 31 sectors. To be a Brand Emissions Leader a brand must pass the following criteria. In summary, it must be reducing its emissions, or already have relatively low emissions; have ambitious targets to reduce emissions further; and publish the evidence necessary to verify these facts.

As you will know from reading this blog, e-waste is one of the topics I follow closely. I think some of this is because I have seen best practice e-waste operations in action in RTP and came away so impressed. Also, I have seen mountains of e-waste in a couple of developing countries and know the negative impact that those can bring to those community. And finally on a philosophical level I love the inputs in e-waste have value (gold, silver, copper, etc) and that these can be harvested via electronics recycling, reusing resources is so much better than throwing them away and starting a new with completely new raw materials

As part of monitoring e-waste policy I came across a few articles this week about an issue I had not been following, an ongoing lawsuit between New York and some consumer electronic industry groups, E-Waste Pops Back Onto the Nation's Radar and 18 States Ask Industry Groups to Withdraw N.Y. E-Waste Suit.

One of the big news stories here in the United States over the last couple of days has been Barack Obama's first state visit to China. This is quite an important interaction at the highest level of government between two of the most influential countries in the world. The agenda includes climate change, economy/trade issues, nuclear proliferation and military relations. Finding common ground on these issues of interdependent importance is obviously critical for achieving any meaningful global progress on these and other topics. For instance, on climate change the U.S. and China are the two largest emitting countries in the world, and the future global regime around greenhouse gasses has to include both countries to have any hope of achieving a meaningful anthropological decrease in global greenhouse gas levels.

One thing that is very cool about this job is the global nature of its scope. Sometimes it is very easy to get in the weeds of local jurisdictions and the local context, after all that is the environment you live in each and every day. Really, I think this is a natural tendency that must be resisted to be successful. Being charged with managing, monitoring and analyzing issues on sustainability and corporate citizenship across the world certainly requires continual vigilance in the global context. The internet really helps, obviously, and I can't really imagine the evolution of CSR and sustainability in the corporate context without the net.

Since I have been feeling particularly international in the last couple of days, I wanted to share few of the recent things I have been working on to highlight the global nature of the job.

Nortel is pleased to announcing a new sustainability program brief, titled Nortel Responds To The Walmart Sustainability Product Index.

This paper traces its roots back to a July greenroots post, Walmart supplier sustainability index: a draft Nortel response. When the Wal-mart product index was announced by the company in July, I put together a draft response from Nortel and posted it up on this blog. This post generated quite a bit of interest and attention as companies responded to the index and as a result we put together a more formal, polished and accurate response. Check out the white paper and you can see the subtle but significant differences in the final version.

Last week I attended a nice webinar sponsored by Nortel, AT&T and Focus that recently got archived and available to anyone on the web. The event, titled Smart Green IT: How to Cut Energy Costs Across Your IT Environment, gave a nice overview of the Green IT landscape and why it should be top of mind to IT professional, CIOs and sustainability professionals. The event was moderated by Michael Oliver-Goodwin, the Contributing Editor at Focus and featured Kenneth Siegler, Principal at IT Transformation Solutions and Bob Gaughan, a Senior Consultant for Enterprise Regional Marketing here at Nortel.

What is the webinar about?

During the session, folks will learn how to drive efficiency across the data center, infrastructure, and facilities, plus optimize energy savings in everyday operations. You can also learn about current global energy trends that are impacting IT and the best tools and resources to achieve greater energy savings.

Recently had a very interesting conversation about energy efficiency and thought it would be good to share in this setting. Basically, one of my colleagues here at Nortel engaged a valued customer on the question of energy efficiency, a topic covered in quite some depth here on greenroots. The questions were looking for the benefits of that value proposition form the customer perspective.

The results of the inquiry were a bit disappointing, as the customer wrote the following; "Honestly, energy efficiency is one of the last criteria we look at (if at all)". However, as you can see from my response below, I think this perspective sells EE a bit short. EE is all about maximizing the value of the network by insuring that the resources used in its operation are productive and lean. It is important to remember that the operating cost of a network throughout its lifetime is often greater than the purchasing price. So, significant differences in operating cost and power demands can lead to big differences in the lifetime cost of the system.

We are pleased announce the release of a new Nortel White Paper that uses our Olympic ad Paralympic network deployment as a lens for considering our corporate sustainability programs. I hope you like the paper, titled Nortel prioritizes sustainability at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, since I wrote it and feel it captures how sustainability has informed and guided so many of our customer relationships, from product design, through deployment, to end of life management.

What is this paper about?

Nortel is proud to be a member of the Olympic family and pleased to be the Official Converged Network Equipment Supplier for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Canada. Nortel works tirelessly to deploy networks that deliver in a sustainable manner, from design to disposal, and we're now bringing this commitment to the Games. This white paper uses examples from our ongoing relationships with the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) to illustrate the sustainable manner in which Nortel manages its operations and delivers for its customers.

Last week I attended the Just Means Social Media for Sustainability conference, which was well done and quite interesting. I thought I would share some of my notes from the session for those that weren't there.

Opening sessions: "You are not in control: a new paradigm of engagement"

- Moving from CSR 1.0 to 2.0, which is moving from the printed CSR report to the communications platform. This has been something we have seen here at Nortel. A CSR report is nice and ours is well done, but the publication rhythm dictated by an annual report means that some of the results that are communicated in the report are outdated by the time it goes public. That is why I greatly prefer using greenroots to communicate with our stakeholders, since can achieve near real-time interaction. The best example is this post on our partnership with the EPA climate leaders program. If this had to wait for our CSR report, it would have become public months after the fact.