Thursday, April 08, 2004
By GreenBiz.com

SAN JOSE, California — A coalition of major Silicon Valley companies has announced an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to collectively combat global warming, one of the first such business collaborations in the United States.

The Sustainable Silicon Valley project (SSV) is a multistakeholder collaborative initiative to produce significant environmental improvement and resource conservation in Silicon Valley through the development and implementation of a regional environmental management system (EMS).

The participating companies — ALZA, Calpine, Hewlett-Packard, Life Scan, Lockheed, Oracle, and PG&E — as well the NASA Ames Research Center, Santa Clara Valley Water District, and the city of San Jose have committed to a goal of cutting Santa Clara County's carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010.

If successful, the effort would be more than triple the goal set by the Kyoto agreement on global warming. It would be as effective as removing 1.1 million cars from Silicon Valley roads, according to some estimates.

“We intend to identify and address environmental and resource pressures in Silicon Valley through a broad partnership of stakeholders and interested parties representing Silicon Valley,” the groups said in a statement. To do this, the partners have agreed to create an environmental management system (EMS) for the region and to undertake "collaborative projects involving businesses, government agencies, nongovernment organizations, and private citizens to significantly reduce selected environmental or resource pressures."

The group said, "An EMS is also a powerful change agent. Properly implemented, an EMS can educate, inspire, propagate integrity and trust, and lay the foundation for sustainability. It is in this spirit that the Sustainable Silicon Valley partnership is pursing the EMS."

According to the organizers, the EMS encompasses environmental and resource pressures, while taking into account related economic and social issues within the portions of San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz Counties known as Silicon Valley.

The economic and social boundaries of the EMS include the collective environmental consequences of the operations of private sector business operations (including headquarters, manufacturing, and other for-profit enterprises, including academic institutions) and public sector (city, county, regional, and state agencies, including joint powers authorities) organizations in the region.

SSV has announced an ambitious goal to voluntarily reduce CO2 emissions in Silicon Valley 20 percent by 2010, using 1990 as a base year. Other regions and entities (Sonoma County, City of Toronto, and many Silicon Valley businesses) already have experience with CO2 emission reduction goals and successes.

SSV adopted an absolute CO2 emission reduction goal for the region, while the reporting protocol provides project participants the flexibility to adopt normalized CO2 emissions reduction goals. Software packages for data gathering are available to participants.

In addition to setting individual and collective targets, the SSV collaborative will provide an opportunity to share case studies and best management practices. SSV will release an annual report highlighting project participants, the achievements of organizations, the actions taken by participants that led to decreasing emissions, and documenting emissions in the region and compare it with the 2010 goal.