North American Telecom Industry Launches Environmental Charter
On 22 February, a group of North American telecommunications firms launched a new voluntary environmental charter for their industry. Seven companies from the US and Canada worked with the nonprofit Center for Resource Management (CRM) to draft the charter and are its first signatories. They are Ameritech, AT&T, BCT.Telus, Bell Atlantic, Bell Canada, Bell South, and US West. The "Environmental Charter for the North American Telecommunications Industry" is part of an industry Communications Environmental Excellence Initiative (CEEI) that will serve as an umbrella for projects that "define a path of continuous industry- wide environmental improvement." Other projects proposed for CEEI include compilation of a list of best management practices for the industry, sharing methods for measuring and benchmarking environmental performance, and developing better means of communicating individual and collective environmental performance.
The charter has its origins in discussions within the environmental subcommittee of the US Telephone Association. Following these discussions, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Bell Canada, and US West launched the CEEI and held a conference in December 1997 that attracted 18 North American companies. At that conference, presented with help from CRM, a number of firms agreed to spend a year developing an environmental charter for the industry. The industry engaged CRM in the charter development process because of its experience in producing a set of environmental principles for the US golf industry and its work as a neutral convenor of stakeholder dialogues. The secretariat for the charter has not been chosen, as issues of governance are unresolved at this point.
The charter identifies the telecom industry's areas of environmental responsibility and states the signatories' intent to move beyond compliance with environmental, health, and safety regulations. The vision statement says that the industry "seeks to be a leader in the area of environmental responsibility as well as an innovator of communications technologies and services, bringing creative solutions to bear on society's natural resource issues and ecological concerns." The charter's principles cover four broad areas: management; technology, service, and product innovation; facilities and operations; and external relations and communications. Management systems are mentioned, but the charter stops short of calling for a formal environmental management system. Supplier relationships and design-for-environment are mentioned, as is reporting on "key elements" of corporate environmental performance. Meredith Miller, senior project manager with CRM, told BATE that "there's awareness that some sort of industry-wide reporting would be useful," but the charter in its present form does not include a commitment to an industry-wide report.
Global Charter A Possibility?
At the signing ceremony in New York City, the North American telecom firms were scheduled to discuss possible areas of environmental collaboration with their European counterparts. The New York gathering also included time for talks about possible collaboration between the telecom industry and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), continuing discussions begun at UNEP's Governing Council Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in early February. There, senior officials from the telecommunications industry took part in a special roundtable discussion on how telecommunications technology might be used globally to address serious environmental and social problems, especially to lessen some effects of large-scale urbanization. There was also talk of a global charter for the telecom industry -- an idea not without precedent, as there are already UNEP-sponsored global charters for the banking and insurance sectors.
At any rate, this is not the first environmental charter in the telecom industry. In late 1996, the European Public Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) launched its "Environmental Charter of European Telecommunications Network Operators" (see BATE, February 1997). The 21 signatories to the ETNO charter reported jointly on their progress in late 1998 (see BATE, January 1999).
Contacts:
Meredith Miller, Center for Resource Management, 1410 Grant Street, C307, Denver, CO 80203, USA. Tel: +1 303 832 6855; Fax: +1 303 832 5622.
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