Environment

NVIDIA’s approach to managing our environmental impact extends beyond policies and systems. It embraces an ecosystem of employees, suppliers and customers.

We focus on three areas:

• Campuses: We’ve pledged to reduce energy and water use, as well as waste generation, on our campuses.
• Suppliers and customers: We work to improve supplier and customer awareness of environmental issues and understand their expectations of our environmental performance.
• Product design: By designing products for improved power efficiency, we can have a broad environmental impact and help our customers reduce their energy consumption. Read more about power efficiency.

Since 2006, our environmental management committee has driven our business operations strategy. It’s also helped us establish programs that reduce our environmental impact and engage employees to do the same. The committee comprises representatives from facilities; environment, health and safety; real estate; IT; supply chain operations; engineering; marketing; and data center operations.

We are working to achieve the following environmental goals by 2012 from a baseline year of 2007:

Environmental Goals Update

We have made the following progress towards our goals (as of December 31, 2011):

• Energy: Reached our 9% GHG reduction goal for campus operations in 2008
• Energy: Our PUE is 1.59, which is 58% of the reductions needed to reach our goal of 1.53
• Waste: Reached the 80% landfill diversion goal in Q1 2011, and are currently at 85% diversion
• Water: We have not yet reached our goal and are continuing to monitor water usage and find ways to reduce. We will report at the end of 2012.

Environmental Strategy

We are committed to continuous improvement in environmental performance. Our environmental management systems at our headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., have been ISO 14001-certified since 2006. NVIDIA passed the ISO 14001 re-certification audit in 2010 and is audited annually to ensure compliance to standards. Each year since our initial participation, we’ve received zero negative findings in our environmental management system.

Our social responsibility and environmental sustainability policies apply to all of our business operations and business units worldwide. In addition, our social responsibility policy requires us to conduct our business operations using industry-agreed social and environmental practices with a management system approach. This helps ensure that we achieve our objectives and continually improve.

The policy aligns with the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) code of conduct and enhances our efforts to promote responsibility throughout our supply chain.

As part of our efforts to become more efficient, we're measuring and tracking our performance. For example, we have been reporting our GHG emissions annually to the shareholder-driven Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) since 2007. (To view our 2011 CDP report, click here. In 2011, our disclosure rating from the CDP was 54, roughly unchanged from 2010 (56), and an increase from 34 in 2009. To improve our rating in 2012, we have engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) to provide limited assurance on our 2011 global Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas data under the AICPA attestation standards. ( UPDATE: September 2012 – NVIDIA's CDP score for 2012 has increased to 82 from 54 the year before. Read our report. )

Through better communication with external stakeholders, we improved our ranking in Newsweek’s Greenest Companies list. In just three years, we’ve steadily moved our ranking from number 314 to 188, and in 2011 we jumped to the number 10 position of the top 500 U.S. companies.

To improve our standing in our headquarters location, we have been an active member of the Bay Area Green Business program since 2007.

We were also recognized in 2012 as a recipient of the Acterra Award for Sustainability in the large-company category.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

NVIDIA defines its GHG emissions scope as the following:

• Scope 1 – natural gas, stationary distillate fuel oil
• Scope 2 – electricity (includes data center)
• Scope 3 – business travel (we currently do not include supply chain emissions in our Scope 3)

The main sources of our GHG emissions are the purchase of electricity to operate our office facilities, laboratories and data centers (Scope 2), and from our employee business travel (Scope 3). Other process-related emissions related to fugitive emissions from cooling devices and diesel fuel for backup generators not owned by NVIDIA are currently excluded until NVIDIA develops reliable monitoring procedures for these emissions sources. Chemicals from our laboratories are not material and are not included in our GHG reporting. Our products are manufactured by our suppliers, so our measured GHG emissions constitute only a portion of the overall GHG and other air emissions related to our growing business. See the supply chain section of this report for more information about our work with suppliers on carbon footprint issues.

We set our GHG emissions goals through our participation in the EPA’s Climate Leaders program. Although the program was eliminated in Fall 2010, we continue to strive to achieve the goals we set in 2007. We anticipate that we will update our goals for 2013 after the 2012 reporting period ends.

In 2012, we have engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) to provide limited assurance on our 2011 international Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas data under the AICPA attestation standards. As we gain recognition for our environmental efforts, we believe it’s critical to assure our emissions data and reporting are as transparent as possible.

We continue to monitor energy emissions in our international offices, and we implemented an energy-management system in 2011. This system will help us target ways to reduce our greenhouse emissions in international offices, starting with our larger facilities (serving more than 100 employees). We also plan to target efficiency initiatives in our larger international facilities. We’ve already begun using the system and are sending aggregated data to various environmental reporting organizations.