We’re supporting Earth Hour

Gareth Rice, O2’s Head of Environment, talks about how O2 is gearing up for Earth Hour this weekend.

On Saturday at 8.30pm people across the world will switch off their lights for one hour in support of the WWF’s Earth Hour. At O2 we’re fully behind this great initiative from the WWF to draw attention to climate change. We’ll not only be supporting Earth Hour from our own perspective as a business with sites across the country, but also by raising awareness of it amongst our employees and customers.

On Saturday we’ll be switching off the signs in all our offices across the UK and they will remain off until Monday morning. Signs and non essential kit in our retails stores will also be turned off from Saturday until the start of the next business day. And despite a major concert taking place, The O2 will also dim its lights in support of Earth Hour.

We’ll also be raising awareness of Earth Hour with customers using plasma screens in our shops, a message on our website (www.o2.co.uk) and using our presences on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve even set up a text reminder service for customers to sign up to. Text EARTH to 2020 and we’ll send a reminder to switch off your lights one hour before Earth Hour starts.

Internally, we’ll be encouraging all of our 12,000 employees to get involved with messages on our intranet and using plasma screens in our main offices.

Clearly our commitment to reducing our impact on the environment doesn’t start and stop with one initiative. For a number of years we’ve been working on how we can reduce our energy consumption and we were the first mobile operator to be awarded the Carbon Trust Standard for the measures we implemented (which saved over 47,000 tonnes of CO2). And we believe we can go even further which is why we were one of the first big businesses to sign up to the 10:10 carbon reduction initiative.

Please do join us in supporting Earth Hour this Saturday.