SOURCE: Quest Diagnostics

DESCRIPTION:

While 2020 proved to be a challenging year, the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t thwart efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. While the country was on pause, some of our colleagues took time to reevaluate how things were done and found ways to reduce our energy, water, and paper consumption.

These projects ranged from LED lighting upgrades in Lab Operations, to waterless vehicle washing in Logistics, and transitioning from printing paper documents to electronic PDFs in our AP Operations. These efforts that were initiated and maintained during the 2020 calendar year are now being honored with the Quest Environmental Sustainability Awards. 

The Sustainability Awards recognize projects that promote better environmental practices including, resource reduction, energy conservation, waste minimization, or improved recycling. The projects are reviewed by the Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) team based on measurable criteria (like tons of emissions reduced, kilowatts of energy saved, or gallons of fuel reduced).

The awards are presented in 3 categories:

• Enterprise award for a program that impacts the company as a whole
• Regional/Location award for specific regions or location projects
• Team/Individual award for those who initiate a specific program or community service

Within each category, there are 3 tiers of awards (Gold, Silver, and Bronze).

Here are the winners in each category:

• Regional Gold award goes to the West Region in California for logistics waterless vehicle (fleet) washing [Salinas, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Grover Beach, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Anaheim, Van Nuys, and Sacramento], which saved 69.6k gallons of water.
• Regional Silver award goes to the West Region for the LED upgrades in Las Vegas, California, which saved 426 metric tons of CO2 equivalents.
• Team/Individual Gold award goes to the Ameripath Non-Technical Operations staff in Knoxville, TN, for initiating a paper reduction initiative at 7 of their 11 hospitals. These hospitals transitioned to accepting electronic PDFs of several documents, which no longer requires them to be printed. This initiative saved approximately 22 boxes of paper last year. This equates to a reduction of 4 metric tons of CO2 equivalents saved. 

Tweet me: The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t thwart @QuestDX's efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. Some of their colleagues took time to reevaluate how things were done and found ways to reduce their energy, water, and paper consumption. Read More: https://bit.ly/3IyNEt6

KEYWORDS: NYSE:DGX, Quest Diagnostics