2. Environmental Programs
The Postal Service awarded four national environmental service contracts that reduced costs, increased efficiency, and assured standardized delivery of services necessary to support environmental compliance activities.

These four contracts replaced more than 270 existing contracts and will save the Postal Service $30 million over the next four years. Services covered under these contracts include planning, program development, testing, sampling, analysis, compliance reviews, training, studies, and surveys on environmental issues.

The contracts provide a mechanism for Postal Service personnel to obtain top quality services necessary to support environmental compliance activities and programs while reducing costs, eliminating duplication of effort, and taking advantage of innovations and increased efficiencies by the contractors.

These contracts also enabled the Postal Service to reduce its field environmental complement of environmental staff by 30 percent and significantly cut expenditures last year. Stakeholders continued to receive all necessary support, however, due to a business-driven realignment of environmental field support services, improved technology solutions, and strategically driven budgeting.

In 2001, the Postal Service won seven White House “Closing the Circle” awards — the most ever received by the Postal Service. These awards are the federal government’s top award for environmental leadership and innovation. One of these initiatives — Total Resource Management — also won the Postal Service’s top project management award.

In May 2001, the Postal Service received the first of 500 electric delivery vehicles that will be deployed in California, New York, and the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. The new electric postal vehicle has no tailpipe because it creates no fumes. It has a battery pack instead of a fuel tank, which means no foreign oil and no trips to the gas station. It tracks better through the snow because it's heavier than the gas-powered version and has better wheel alignment. And the postal carriers who have tested the prototypes making curbside deliveries in California say they also like one other feature of the quiet electric vehicle — the dogs don't hear it.

Ongoing efforts include deployment of the 500 electric-powered delivery vehicles began in February and will be completed in April 2002. Letter Carriers in southern California, White Plains, NY, and Washington, DC, are using these zero-emissions vehicles successfully.