In addition to our energy conservation efforts, we are benefiting from a grassroots commitment to environmental awareness as our employees become ambassadors for the business.

Projects contributing to our reductions in 2009 include:

• Our corporate rental car partner, Hertz, provided a hybrid vehicle option for our employees. In January 2009, approximately 4 percent of employees chose this eco-friendly benefit. By July, the number soared closer to 60 percent, where it remained the rest of the year. 2009 also marked the launch of a new $500 incentive program to sales associates who chose to drive hybrid cars.
• Many employees commuted to work by carpool or public transportation and as a result received back a cumulative $400,000 from the company through our alternative transportation program.
• Our Smart Monitoring Service, which promotes servicing via remote diagnostic tools versus onsite customer service calls, resulted in an avoidance of 520,000 car miles equaling 231 metric tons of CO2 emissions, or 26,000 gallons of gasoline, in 2009. In an effort to reduce air travel, employees increased use of alternative options and logged more than 1,300 video meetings, 39,500 web meetings, and 175,000 teleconferences instead.
• We saw an increase in voluntary Green Team participation to more than 200 employees across 15 sites. In 2010, we introduced our carbon management plan, which will also take these carbon emissions into our accounting method. Using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative as a compass, we began measuring sources of carbon to include business travel, employee commuting, product shipment and transportation, cold storage, and the company fleet.