‘Sustainability at heart of Meralco operations’

By Lenie Lectura -February 28, 2020
from Business Mirror

The Manila Electric Company (Meralco) has established a Sustainability Office (SO) as an affirmation of its commitment to sustainability as core to its strategy and operations.

“With the establishment of the SO, we have affirmed our commitment to sustainability as front and center to our business, as core to the company’s strategy and operations. Given this, we have identified four areas we will focus on as we drive this sustainability agenda,” said Meralco Chief Sustainability Officer Raymond Ravelo.

The four focus areas of Meralco’s sustainability agenda include Planet, People, Power and Prosperity.

Under “Planet,” Ravelo said Meralco would continue to develop and execute programs to help preserve and protect environment.

On “People,” Ravelo said this captures Meralco’s effort to embed a sustainable mindset within the organization and put these principles into practice.

Ravelo said that a big part of the company’s sustainability program, which is under “Power,” is ensuring that all unserved and underserved areas within its franchise are energized. For “Prosperity,” Ravelo said this could be achieved by ensuring that all decisions as a company, initiatives and investments are guided and balanced by sustainability principles.

Starting this year, Meralco’s sustainability initiatives will be driven by an overarching program called Powering the Good Life in which five priority areas have been identified.

“The first 3 are PLANET related—direct emissions reduction, resource efficiency and waste management. The 4th area, Community Electrification captures our POWER initiative. And finally Workplace Excellence will house our PEOPLE programs,” he said.

Meralco, he said, has launched a number of projects under each of these pillars.

Under Direct Emissions Reductions, the company is looking at installing solar PV systems on its facilities and offices. Also, it will evaluate its entire vehicle fleet to identify which units could be electrified.

Under Resource Efficiency, Meralco said it will “greenify” Lopez Building by continuing to replace lights with LEDs and also to convert air conditioning units to inverter type ones.

Finally, under Waste Management, Meralco has implemented a company-wide ban on single-use plastics.