Environment

NVIDIA’s approach to managing our environmental impact combines policies, systems and engagement within our entire ecosystem—that is, our employees, suppliers and customers.

• On our campuses, we have pledged to reduce energy and water use and waste generation.
• We partner with our suppliers and customers to improve their awareness of environmental issues and understand their expectations of our environmental performance.
• Through our product design, we are working to improve power efficiency. The energy efficiency of our products gives us an opportunity to help our customers and end users reduce their energy consumption and have a broad environmental impact. Read more about power efficiency.

Our environmental management committee, formed in 2006, drives our business operations strategy and helps us establish programs that reduce our environmental impact and engage employees to do the same. It 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:

We look beyond legal compliance to work towards 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.

Visualize Green
At NVIDIA, Visualize Green means leveraging the creativity of our employees and business partners to drive innovation and resource efficiency in our operations and our products, with the goal of leaving a healthier planet for future generations.

We are working to gain better insight into our environmental impact. For example, we have been reporting our GHG emissions annually to the shareholder-driven Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) since 2007. (To view our 2010 CDP report, click here.) In 2010, our disclosure rating from the CDP increased to 56 from 34 in 2009.

And by better communication with external stakeholders, we were able to increase our ranking in Newsweek’s Greenest Companies. Our ranking in 2009 was 314 out of 500 U.S. companies, and in 2010 our score improved to 188. We scored particularly high in our Environmental Impact score, ranking 4 out of 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.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

• Scope 1 – natural gas, chemicals used in laboratories, stationary distillate fuel oil, fugitive emissions from refrigerants
• 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 GHG emissions are the purchase of electricity, cooling of our data centers and employee business travel. We are a growing semiconductor company whose 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 business. See the supply chain section of this report for more information about our work with suppliers on carbon footprint issues.

We set our greenhouse emissions goals through our participation in the EPA’s Climate Leaders program, and although the program was eliminated in fall 2010, we will continue to strive to achieve the goals we pledged in 2007.

We continue to monitor energy emissions in our international offices and, in 2011, will be implementing an energy-management system to target ways to reduce our greenhouse emissions in those offices. We plan to target efficiency initiatives in the larger international facilities, i.e., offices with more than 100 employees.