Mariano Legaz, Verizon’s VP of Supply Chain Services

To be an industry leader in Corporate Responsibility, Alcatel-Lucent has high expectations of its suppliers and the critical role they play within our global supply chain. In turn, our customers, like Verizon, expect the same from us. Verizon’s Mariano Legaz recently met with Alcatel-Lucent suppliers to share how Verizon leads by example – and underscores the importance of every link. Read more from him in this post:

At Verizon, it is our belief that delivering long-term business results is just as important as delivering long-term social value. As our company Credo states, “We are good corporate citizens and share our success with the community to make the world in which we work a better place than it was yesterday.”

If you took a look under the hood of Verizon’s industry-leading products and services, you’d see that sustainability and responsibility is at the foundation of how we do business

We operate one of the largest commercial fleets in the world, and now have about 3,000  alternative-fuel vehicles. This, along with purchasing more efficient vehicles helped us reduce our fuel consumption by 13 percent in 2011, and by 14.7 million gallons since 2009. All new networking equipment from our vendors is now required to be at least 20 percent more energy efficient than previous models. Did you recently have FiOS installed in your home? If you did, your TV set-top boxes are 30 percent more efficient than previous models. And we’re not just making your home more efficient – our many office buildings and datacenters are using smart building technology that has resulted in a reduction of 55 million kilowatt hours in energy reduction per year.

All in all, since 2009, we’ve reduced our carbon intensity – the amount of energy we use to transmit a terabyte of data – by more than 30 percent. By 2020, we’ll have reduced it by 50 percent.

Another important  component of a responsible supply chain is giving all qualified suppliers an opportunity to work with Verizon, and that is evident in our commitment to supplier diversity. We’re proud to say that in the last six years we’ve spent more than $22 billion with minority- and women-owned suppliers. Verizon is also a charter member of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, an organization of companies that spend more than $1 billion annually with diverse suppliers.

At Verizon, we embrace diversity not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it’s also smart business. The same goes for sustainability. More and more, people and businesses are looking to do business with companies that have this commitment to sustainability and responsibility. Verizon is a pioneer of this thinking.