Our Plan for Sustainability

At DIRECTV we’re dedicated to creating a more sustainable future. How exactly are we doing it? How do we know what issues to focus on? How do we measure our progress?

Working towards a sustainable future is no easy feat, and we still have opportunities to pursue. However, DIRECTV has made great strides and already taken important steps that we believe will help us in our sustainability journey.

While there is still work to do, DIRECTV has implemented sustainability practices throughout all aspects of our company.

Our work is guided by a team of more than 20 passionate leaders drawn from across the company. The team is overseen by our Executive Vice President, Services and Operations, and managed day-to-day by our Senior Director of Sustainability through our Supply Chain organization. These team members represent a wide variety of skills and expertise, so whether it’s making our receivers more efficient, finding ways to reduce packaging, or recycling electronic waste, our team members are focused on reducing DIRECTV’s environmental impact.

Having evaluated a wide range of issues where we have an impact, we identified the following four focus areas and set corresponding visionary principles to guide our efforts:

1. Greenhouse gas emissions from operations: Continually reduce the carbon footprint of operations, including facilities and fleet, through innovative technologies and management approaches.
2. Waste from operations: Reduce waste to the landfill from our operations and facilities to practically zero by avoiding material use and maximizing recycling of packaging, paper, and other disposables.
3. Product (receivers): Lead the industry in increasing efficiency and decreasing energy required to deliver our services in our customers homes.
4. Consumer recycling: Give every customer the means to recycle all of his/her DIRECTV equipment easily and responsibly.

With these visionary principles in mind, we set the following short and mid-term goals:

Headline Goals

1. Reduce our carbon footprint for our U.S. operations by 5% by 2015 from our 2011 baseline.
2. Increase the percentage of active ENERGY STAR-qualified receivers in our total deployed fleet to 70% by 2013.
3. Reduce the average annual household electricity use with the new 3-room Whole-Home HD DVR system by 25% in 2013 from 2011 baseline.
4. Continue our efforts to responsibly recycle and to examine additional methods to further reduce our total waste to landfills, including new packaging opportunities.

Sub Goals

1. Publish our first carbon footprint for the U.S. operations of our company by 2012.
2. Measure and publish the carbon footprint of our non-U.S. operations by 2015.
3. Reduce gallons of gasoline per work order by 5% by 2015 from our 2011 baseline.
4. Engage our top 50 suppliers in sustainability discussions.
5. Assure that all our suppliers, including product manufacturers and outsourced service providers, meet our Environmental and Social Code of Conduct by 2016.
6. Measure baseline footprint for amount of materials (e.g., metal and plastic) used per house installation.
7. Calculate and publish our waste footprint for U.S. facilities.
8. 35% of customers using a paperless form of billing by 2015.
9. 100% of customers have the option to return or recycle all DIRECTV in-home installed equipment by 2015.
10. Continue to reuse or recycle 100% of receivers recovered from customer homes.

Now that we have visionary principles to guide us and goals we’re working toward aggressively, we’re also keeping a close eye on our key indicators—the aspects of our business that give us the greatest insight into how our sustainability initiatives are progressing. We began our efforts in earnest in 2011; the 2011 data below sets a baseline we’ll measure our progress against:

Note: Our key indicators align with the Global Reporting Initiative (version 3.1) environmental indicators (found here).

With this in mind, we will be able to monitor our progress as we move forward.