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October 5, 2007

Sun Releases 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report

Sun Microsystems has released its 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.

According to the report, more than 90 percent of reported GHG emissions from Sun’s operations are from electricity use in its facilities. In total, the report says that Sun reduced electricity consumption in its U.S. buildings by 22 percent, gas consumption by 32 percent, and carbon emissions by 21 percent.

A major reason for the reduction is that by consolidating data centers, Sun reduced its “real estate holdings by more than 15 percent, or 2.6 million square feet in fiscal 2007,” according to the report.

Sun has taken a number of other measures to cut energy use:

• Introduced 27 low-cost or no-cost measures to optimize the operation of facilities, which include having all U.S. buildings cleaned during daylight hours to keep lights off outside working hours. A change Sun expects will save 334 metric tons of CO2 annually.
• Identified 45 projects that will reduce our overall energy costs by 4 percent annually. Replacing light bulbs with lower wattage bulbs at the campus in Menlo Park, California, is projected to save 90,584 kWh of electricity annually.

Sun has made the complete report available in a Web-format, not as a PDF. The thinking, perhaps, is that a PDF would encourage people to print it.
“Ever striving for increased eco responsibility (and recognizing that the medium is the message), the full report is exclusively Web-based,” Marcy Scott Lynn, corporate social responsibility program manager at Sun, writes in her blog. “There is a 12-page summary report that you can download as a PDF from the site.”

Hopefully, Lynn will discuss the reaction to the report in her blog. Last year, she seemed perturbed at the reaction from within Sun.

“Do you mean to tell me that in a company of 38,000 employees, only 247 of them bothered to download the company’s first-ever corporate social responsibility report?” Lynn wrote, one week after the report was released. “If employees aren’t reading it, and they have a serious stake in our company’s work in this area, does that mean nobody is? And if nobody is reading it, why are we reporting in the first place? Wouldn’t our resources be better used some other way?”

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