When it comes to doing more with less or rolling up our sleeves for a worthy cause, few organizations are as capable as Leap. This is why the formation of the Cricket Green Team was a natural step for our company. The Green Team is staffed entirely by volunteers within the Leap and Cricket organizations who are personally inspired to reduce our environmental impact. Green Team members are engaged across all functions of the company, and share the credo: “If you come up with an idea, you’ve got to execute it.” From packaging to network infrastructure to the energy consumption in our corporate offices and retail stores, every member spearheads ways to reduce our carbon footprint in his or her respective field of expertise. It’s another example of how personal initiative drives positive change at our company.
The accomplishments of our Green Team have yielded overwhelming support from employees and have inspired a wealth of compelling ideas and positive momentum. Here are just a few of the ways in which Green Team initiatives are lowering our environmental impact and, in many cases, helping us continue to offer lower costs and better value to our customers.
Perhaps one of the Green Team’s biggest achievements so far was the development of Leap’s two LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certified corporate campuses in San Diego and Denver. The following have contributed to Leap’s LEED certifications:
We rethought the design of our packaging. The new packaging is made from all recyclable materials and includes no plastic. Product manuals are a fraction of their former size. The new design is also 50% smaller, which translates into a nearly 50% reduction in overseas shipping and fuel costs.
Currently about 90% of our energy consumption comes from our network stations and cell towers and we’re working to bring that down. Today, 3,000 of our network base stations are being upgraded with new stations that operate on 50% less electricity. This will ultimately save Leap and our Cricket customers about $4 million per year. We’re reducing energy consumption at our cell sites by running generators once every two weeks instead of weekly, thereby realizing a 25% decrease in energy through more efficient heating and air conditioning systems. When it comes to great ideas, we’re not afraid to think outside of the box either. In Portland, Oregon, we’ve replaced the weed killer that we used to spray to reduce interference at our cell sites with a herd of brush-clearing goats!
We are initiating a program to reduce electricity consumption in our Cricket stores by replacing traditional incandescent light systems with energy-efficient LED lighting – a move that could save about $150,000 per year in energy costs.
Leap has teamed up with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -certified partner to facilitate the responsible re-use and recycling of old handsets. This program will enable us to broaden our offerings of refurbished replacement phones, while allowing us to recycle parts and even some of the chemicals used in discarded handsets.
We are also rolling out new suggested guidelines for current and prospective vendors, in order to help drive partners along our supply chain toward more environmentally-friendly operating procedures.
