Preserving the Planet
- Progress Report
- Environmental Goals and Priorities
- Environmental, Health and Safety Governance
- Climate Protection
- Preserving Biodiversity and Forests: Xerox and Paper
- Preserving Clean Air and Water through Reducing Use of Toxics and Heavy Metals
- Waste Prevention and Management
- Environmental Performance in Xerox Facilities
- Environmental Remediation and Compliance
Environmental Remediation and Compliance
For more than 25 years, Xerox has conducted a proactive program to identify and clean up contaminated sites around the world. These efforts include a voluntary assessment program, begun in 1985, which resulted in identifying 68 facilities and operations sites that have required remediation. As the sites were identified, the company, as necessary, took immediate measures to ensure the protection of employees, neighbors and the environment from possible adversity.
To accelerate some of the remedial timeframes, we concentrated our initial efforts on source areas of contamination. In most instances, source area remedial measures were very successful in achieving their reduction goals. Many of these sites may now be managed with migration control techniques that limit potential movement and exposure. As a result of our extensive remedial efforts, some sites have been remediated to the point where they no longer require corrective actions and have subsequently allowed our Corporate Real Estate Department to sell some of these as excess properties for redevelopment or to terminate active leaseholds.
Today, only nine of the original 68 sites require further remedial or control measures. The total number of sites was increased in 2010 by one as a result of a recent acquisition. Xerox fell short of meeting its goal of completing remediation activities at three sites in 2010 due to increased regulatory requirements and scope changes by property owners. Action plans are in place to address these issues.
In addition to using conventional techniques for groundwater pumping and soil excavation, Xerox has been at the forefront of developing and using innovative remedial technologies. These include techniques that enhance the recovery of contaminants such as High Vacuum 2-Phase Extraction® and bedrock and hydraulic fracturing. In addition, contaminants are converted to less-harmful substances through technologies such as enhanced biodegradation and chemical oxidation.
Cumulative Number of Sites Remediated
Compliance Penalties
Xerox requires its various operations and subsidiary organizations around the globe to report allegations of regulatory violations to Xerox’s corporate Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability group for tracking, evaluation and corrective action, where appropriate. Based upon this reporting system, Xerox identified no instances where it was subject to a compliance penalty in 2010.
PARC’s Cleantech Innovation Program focuses on
cost-effective, manufacturable solutions
for some of
the world’s pressing energy needs.
PARC, an independent Xerox subsidiary, today leverages its deep competencies and decades of innovation experience in printing technology for Xerox to help address important and high-value environmental challenges for its numerous commercial and government clients. Expertise in diverse areas – such as co-extrusion printing; microfluidics and hydrodynamic separation; optical systems and semiconductor processes; and model-based planning, optimization and control – are being applied to cleantech solutions for battery and energy storage, clean water, solar electricity, data center energy optimization and more. In one success story, PARC scientists helped a solar concentrator startup, SolFocus, Inc., achieve low-cost solar electricity; the company was incubated at PARC until it grew to 50+ employees and began its first commercial deployments. In another success story, PARC invented a novel “co-extrusion” printing approach that results in low-cost, non-contact, manufacturing-ready printing of multiple materials – the process results in intricate microscale geometric structures with multiple energy conversion and storage applications. To address low-cost solar electricity, PARC is already commercializing the technology with a major solar cell manufacturer to enable higher-efficiency PV cells (which in turn ensures lower cost per watt). To address energy storage, PARC is working on increasing both power and energy density without the typical power-energy tradeoff (which in turn enables affordable energy storage for widespread EV adoption).