We're hard at work using less energy.
We're committed to reducing our energy consumption and our CO2 emissions.
We use about 63% of our total CO2 emissions operating our network.
Air travel is another significant contributor to emissions and we are committed to reducing this where possible.
In 2006 our CO2 emissions increased 25 percent, due to the increased number of mobile phone base stations needed to service our customers and improve our national coverage.
Our network consumes a lot of energy through air-conditioning, as sensitive equipment must be kept within a temperature-controlled climate. More than 45 percent of all air-conditioned sites use free cooling technology and traditional air-conditioning units have become much more efficient.
Globally, we aim to reduce network CO2 emissions per megabyte of data by 40 percent by 2011. In New Zealand we are working on setting a new energy efficiency target.
As an active member of the Sustainable Business Network, Vodafone New Zealand has signed up to the Greenfleet programme which involves the planting of trees to offset the fuel usage of our fleet vehicles. Last year, we planted enough trees to offset the 52.8 tonnes of CO2 emissions from 15 of our fleet vehicles.
With support from the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) in 2005, Vodafone developed a new transportation policy called i-commute, encouraging employees to use alternative modes of transport like cycling, walking or public transport. Personalised travel plans were prepared for more than 200 of employees, highlighting their public transport options.
We extended the i-commute programme in 2007 to include a carpooling programme called Rideshare. Rideshare is an easy-to-use online system for employees to share car rides to work. Matching is map-based, and the system searches other criteria such as journey start and end times, requests to share with the same gender only, etc.
