This 2009 sustainability report focuses on our accomplishments across the entire organization, and illustrates our continuing efforts to integrate sustainability principles into our daily business practices.
Introduction
This report covers the United States Postal Service’s sustainability performance for fiscal year 2009. It focuses on our accomplishments across the entire organization, and illustrates our continuing efforts to integrate sustainability principles into our daily business practices. We recognize that both opportunities and challenges are ahead as we strive for even higher performance levels.
This report is available online along with our other public reports, including the Postal Service’s corporate annual report and the Comprehensive Statement on Postal Operations. To read these reports for 2009 and previous years, please visit www.usps.com.
This report conforms to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, version 3.0 (commonly called G3). The GRI G3 framework is the most widely adopted standard for publicly disclosing sustainability performance for private and public organizations.
For more information about GRI, visit www.globalreporting.org. Based on GRI criteria to assess conformance with the reporting guidelines, we believe the report (supported by additional materials cited in the GRI content index) achieves a B application level. The GRI application grid below, along with the GRI content index, identifies each included disclosure and performance indicator.
We have not undertaken a third-party review of our report but are planning external assurance of future reports. Certain elements in this report — for example, greenhouse gas emissions — have been verified by third parties.
In this report we provide some estimations of our sustainability performance, such as the vehicle energy we use, the amount of waste we produce and the amount of material we recycle. Where possible, we have used direct measurement to generate the performance indicator.
When direct measurement is not available, estimation methodologies have been created that use tangential sources such as financial data. Some methodologies and systems used to gather and analyze this data have changed since 2008, and in most cases represents a more accurate accounting of our operations.
Where possible, we have restated numbers presented in the 2008 report with the updated calculation. Where a new calculation could not be performed, we have noted the difference.
GRI application grid
