Sustainable Supply Chain
Susan Brownell
Vice President,
Supply Management
Green purchasing
Green purchasing is a central component of the Postal Service’s Sustainability program.
Since 1996, USPS has required the use of nonhazardous and environmentally preferable products. And we avoid using specific hazardous chemicals in our daily operations.
In 2008, the Postal Service formed a green purchasing team with cross-functional membership and supplier representation. The team developed our first-ever comprehensive national Green Purchasing Plan 2008–2010.
The plan gives our USPS purchasing and supply employees the business practices and tools they need to help the Postal Service conserve natural resources, reduce waste, protect the environment and provide a safe workplace.
The plan requires evaluating environmentally preferable products as part of our purchasing decisions — along with price, quality and delivery standards.
Examples include products made from recycled content or renewable resources.
USPS also looks for eco-label certified products, such as Green Seal, EcoLogo, Energy Star and EPEAT-registered electronics.
In addition, we look for water-conserving products and products free of targeted hazardous chemicals.
A PRIME example
More than 6,000 USPS PRIME printers are busy helping the Postal Service reduce its paper use and costs. Since switching the printers to automatically print on both sides of a piece of paper, USPS has reduced the number of sheets the printers use by nearly 1.8 million each month — that’s the same as saving nearly 2,000 trees a year.
PRIME printers are also responsible for USPS reducing the number of color "print images" — a page of information regardless of the scale it’s printed at — by nearly 500,000 a month.
Closing the Circle award
In April 2009, the Postal Service received a White House Closing the Circle award for its comprehensive green purchasing program, the 40th such award USPS has earned.
The award also recognized USPS for acquiring more than $268 million worth of environmentally preferable products in FY 2008, including more than 100,700 tons of paper, cardboard, plastic and metal made from recycled content.
To assure we’re buying green, USPS collected annual environmentally preferable product purchasing reports from more than 100 national Postal Service suppliers during FY 2009.
Facts and Figures
17
tons of lead
removed from environment by switching to lead-free wheel weights
2,800
tons of recycled metal
by purchasing rebuilt vehicle parts
5,000
monitors
changed from CRT to more efficient TFT
A smaller footprint
Supply Management is helping USPS reduce its physical footprint throughout the Postal Service, consolidating 11 transportation contracting field offices into five, plus one satellite branch. Also, two purchasing shared services centers now replace 74 field positions.
The task of getting stamps and envelopes to more than 34,000 Post Offices and retail locations is being streamlined as well.
With its asset management integration initiative, USPS is consolidating 80 field stamp distribution offices and accountable paper depositories into six stamp distribution centers. And we’ve realigned two existing stamp service centers.
These changes and others are delivering millions in annual savings and allowing us to further leverage our supply chains and make them greener.
We also continue to receive recognition for tapping into a diverse group of suppliers who assist us in our sustainability efforts.
In FY 2009, the Postal Service exceeded its participation targets for small, minority-owned and women-owned businesses in contracting.
As a result of its efforts, DiversityBusiness.com recognized USPS as America’s top government agency for multicultural business opportunities for the fifth consecutive year.
Using information technology procurement to drive sustainability
- At our Eagan, MN, data center, the second generation of the USPS Advanced Computing Environment replaced more than 3,000 servers with 650 blade-style servers through virtualization — a software enhancement that turns a single server into multiple servers. The new servers’ water-cooled cabinets also reduce airconditioning requirements.
- USPS remote encoding centers in Salt Lake City, UT, and Wichita, KS, now have more than 5,000 new 20-inch thin-film transistor monitors that replace less-energy-efficient CRT monitors. The change has reduced the two sites’ energy use for both power and cooling.
- By using enterprise storage architecture technology, the two major data centers in Eagan and San Mateo consolidated systems, resulting in a reduction from 120 platforms to less than 30 shared storage arrays. The change reduced costs by $1.7 million, which included $366,000 in savings from lower energy use and lower end-of-life disposal costs.
