my upcoming conferences
:.see all
Hi, I'm William. I'm the Director, Online Banking & Engagement at Vancity, Canada's largest credit union.
My opinions and views are just that, and don't reflect the views of my employer (or, perhaps, anyone else).
my peers
:.BankerVision
:.Banking Kismet
:.Banktastic
:.The Bankwatch
:.Benry
:.The Boardcast
:.Buzz Canuck
:.The Client Side
:.CU Communicator
:.CU Employee
:.CU Hype
:.The CU Loop
:.Currency Marketing
:.Denise Wymore
:.Doug True
:.EverythingCU
:.The Financial Brand
:.Marketing ROI
:.NetBanker
:.Nexus Connection
:.Noise to Signal
:.Open Source CU
:.Social Signal
:.The Story
:.Tinfoiling
:.Trey Reeme
:.Verity's Our Voices
Vancity is carbon neutral.
There are so many reasons why I love working at Vancity, and now I have another really big one.
We announced today, after having it externally audited and verified, that as of December 31, 2007 Vancity is offically carbon neutral. In fact, we are the first North American financial institution to become carbon neutral.
So what does that mean?
It means we've tracked our footprint to assess the amount of carbon we emit.
Then we focused on reducing our emissions as much as we possibly could.
And finally, whatever carbon emissions we could not reduce, we purchased high quality local offsets to bring us to carbon neutrality.
This is a huge accomplishment and has been a major focus of the company for quite some time. In fact, we achieved our goal a full two years ahead of schedule by getting our employees across the organization involved and engaged in the issue.
A truly great announcement, and I imagine we'll garner quite a bit of press coverage about it.
I especially love our new limited-time carbon neutral logo on the website.Labels: corporate responsibility, credit union, environment, innovation, news, vancity
posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008
4 comments
William -
Congrats to you and the folks at Vancity! That's a terrific achievement - thanks for sharing it!
Jeff
comment from 
Jeff Hardin on April 09, 2008
Many congratulations! Two years ahead of schedule, too!
comment from
Trey Reeme on April 09, 2008
Congratulations Vancity. It is a very inspiring organization.
comment from
Tim McApine on April 09, 2008
Thanks guys. This was truly a monumental effort. Carbon neutral can mean offsetting your emissions and greenwashing the marketing.
We did it for real by reducing everywhere we could, and offsetting that amount we just couldn't presently reduce (though we have plans to continue).
We got the endorsement of a leading environmentalist, David Suzuki (got my photo with him today). Very exiting day, long in the planning.
comment from
wazaroff on April 09, 2008
make a comment
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.