Meet This Year’s Oracle Sustainability Champions

Oracle is proud to recognize the 2022 Oracle Sustainability Champions—employees around the world who are leading from the seat they are in and directly contributing to a more sustainable future. Each year, the Oracle Global Sustainability Team honors inspiring employees whose efforts help reduce our environmental footprint and improve the quality of life in the communities where they live and work. Learn how this year’s champions are making an impact:

Dan Mellish serves on the Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board in Colorado. Dan is recognized for his leadership in the Choose 2 Reuse campaign in Louisville. The estimated total of single-use bags distributed in Louisville alone is approximately 4.5 million bags or 25 tons per year. Dan served as treasurer for the Choose 2 Reuse campaign which aimed to drastically reduce that figure. The team helped raise awareness in his hometown to pass a citywide $.25 bag tax for purchases using store provided plastic or paper bags.  The ballot measure passed with a wide margin and was implemented in January 2022.  To help with the transition and to encourage reuse, complimentary canvas bags are distributed in stores and low-income housing units. Dan is a Channel Sales Manager in the Western US and is gearing up for several local Earth Month clean-up activities. 

Corporate Citizenship, Real Estate & Facilities and several Oracle Green Teams in Latin America banded together last year to consider creative ways to have an environmental impact in the region. The result was Focus on Environment: There’s no planet B Latin America Rally. The primary goal of the rally was to generate environmental awareness, share sustainable practices, and drive engagement via weekly challenges. In addition, the group hosted non-governmental organizations and experts who spoke about the circular economy, environmental impact of fast fashion, the food industry and the cosmetic industry. The rally took place over four weeks across 9 countries, with more than 1,400 people actively participating, in 2 languages. It was a collaborative effort across the teams and demonstrated that a better future is possible, and we have a collective and individual responsibility to change our habits. Well done Daniela Porcellato, Karla Rojas, Roberto Puga, Amanda Saviano, Mariana Souza, Vanessa Scaburri, Liliana Vargas, Raelly Muñoz, Cristina Carmona, Maria Jacques, Alan Astudillo and Sarah Blain!

Indiwar Singh and Anantha Rao and have spearhead an effort to enhance Oracle transportation Management Cloud (OTM) capabilities to calculate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for every transportation move. With support from the EMEA Logistics Center of Excellence team led by Giovanni Lovo, Indiwar and Anantha researched carbon emissions in the transportation industry and devised a solution to measure CO2 emissions for every transport move made in OTM. The solution leverages OTM's built-in Transportation Intelligence to provide KPIs and reports to help customers identify unsuitable modes or service providers and make suitable strategic decisions to achieve the targeted CO2 emissions. The duo, along with Diego Rondon Tello, are working across several organizations to enhance the solution and make available for other regions.

Jarrod Edwards works as a Senior Manager in Product Strategy for the Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit. After completing his Masters’ thesis in Sustainability, Jarrod discovered the building industry consumes 40% of energy and emits almost 40% of CO2 in the USA, while wasting 57% compared to 26% in other industries of its resource inputs during the production process. This inspired Jarrod to spearhead a new initiative within Oracle Aconex. Specifically, to help customers measure their carbon footprint, Jarrod is working on designing and developing pre-defined templates for common construction processes with greener options available. This will give users the ability to analyze their operations and make modification toward a more long-term sustainable solution.  

Did you know that Oracle offers pick up, transport, and recycling of our products for free? This is all managed by the Reverse Supply Chain Operations (RSCO) Team at Oracle. The team has developed a closed loop process to recover, reuse, or recycle our assets from our suppliers, customers, and data centers. In addition, the team developed tools that help identify products and components that are needed to support internal and external customer demand.  These initiatives help protect the environment and provide valuable services for our customers. RSCO Oracle tracks and reports on the recovery, reuse, and recycling of our programs on a quarterly basis. In addition, the Team was awarded a Sustainability Leadership and High Achiever Award in 2019 from the National Association of Manufacturers. RSCO Oracle continues to create manufacturing processes that do not pollute, conserve energy and natural resources, and are economically sound and safe for employees, communities, and consumers. Sustainability is everyone’s business and RSCO Oracle is doing their part! Kudos to Dianne Bellomy, Ying Ying Chen, Phuong Daros, Bryan Doan, Lydia Pizzi, Parker Proffitt, Danh Tran, Chris Yeh, Mike McCormack, Mihaella Balfour, Craig Brown, Derek Fraser, Ernst Klaassen, Dale Roush and Becky Sorce.

Barend de hont has been a Corporate Citizenship Community Leader for the past four years, spearheading sustainability events and awareness building activities in Benelux. Last year, he led an internal session titled “Sustainability in Action at Oracle” where participants learned about sustainability and participated in a quiz led by Barend and a local environmental nonprofit. His passion for helping the planet has led Barend to continue building his knowledge and finding new ways to support EMEA sales teams with customer engagements related to sustainability. To that end, Barend is currently studying Sustainability Management at Vlerick Business School in Brussels. 

Throughout FY22, Paul Mardle has worked with his global solution centre colleagues Ankur Jain and Gaurav Gupta to develop an Oracle Consulting asset that allows for the rapid implementation of a sustainability management and control solution built on Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). Paul has led the sales enablement activities across EMEA and North America resulting in many customer conversations. The customer discussions have focused on demonstrating how to leverage value from existing assets and the support from Oracle applications and technology on defining their unique journey towards a truly sustainable organisation. Paul, Ankur and Gaurav have used the knowledge gained from these valuable customer interactions to inform and improve Oracle’s Sustainability Reference Architecture and continuously promote the proactive development of sustainability programmes within the customer base and throughout the community.

Roisin Fludgate and Sarah Chu manage the Program Solutions team within Oracle’s Manufacturing & Distribution organization. Together, with their teams in Ireland and the US, they have focused their efforts on sourcing sustainable and socially responsible promotional products globally while adhering to branding guidelines. Working with other lines of business, they are helping to drive down the use of non-environmentally friendly products. Recent initiatives include the re-use, upcycling, and recycling of promotional items, transitioning volunteer t-shirt supply to a local supply model in India thus reducing the need to ship from Ireland and encouraging the shift to sustainable and ethically responsible promotional manufacturers and suppliers. They are currently working to introduce a new 100% recycled awards, partnering with a vendor that manufactures products using recycled plastics. They are aiming to launch this offering in FY23.

James Hill is the Lead Sustainability Engineer for OCI Data Center Engineering Operations and a Data Center Engineer at the Utah Compute Facility (UCF). James is leading the OCI Sustainability effort, integrating the plans, teams, and discussions to ensure that OCI is 100% renewable by 2025. James has a BS in Construction and Facilities Management and LEED AP Operations and Maintenance (O&M) certification, and his knowledge and training became necessary to overcome hurdles with the UCF LEED certification efforts.  He was willing to take over the broad scope of the O&M certification process for the UCF and turned around the program for both the Austin Data Center and UCF. He scheduled and led team meetings for both sites and engaged with the U.S. Green Building Council to devise an alternate path for data-center water credits. His determination, organization, and professionalism led to the UCF being awarded the LEED Silver certification.

Carolina Fraile has always held a strong commitment to help the planet. In recent years, she has incorporated sustainability into her personal life, while also driving initiatives at Oracle. Carolina recycles her home organic waste, drastically reduces plastic use, and uses public transportation as well as biking and walking to get around. She uses bulk cleaning products, grows vegetables, and makes her own cosmetics. In her community, Carolina formed a group to promote the creation of a new community garden and after several meetings with City Hall, the project is approved, and the new garden will be created in 2023. Carolina also helped create Cleanup Montjuïc which gathers regularly to clean the nearby mountain area. At Oracle, Carolina leads the Barcelona Green Team, participated in the European Digital Cleanup and is a frequent speaker on sustainability.

Rita Visser is a part of the Oracle Global Travel team and works directly with the Oracle preferred partners across the globe.  Rita continues to push Oracle’s airline, hotel and ground transportation partners to bring sustainable solutions to Oracle employees.  Rita sits on many Customer Advisory Boards as well as a Board Member for the Global Business Travel Association.  Her work with these entities is also helping to push travel for more sustainable options and solutions. She was integral in creating and helps to measure Oracle’s 2025 goal of a 25% reduction in carbon emissions. She is a travel expert who is passionate about making business travel sustainable and helping Oracle employees by giving them trusted partners with aggressive plans to help their communities, their customers and the world. 

Carmen Campo, Isabelle Flageul, Kathy Wu, Olivier Goujon for their efforts spearheading the European Digital Cleanup Challenge. For three weeks in October 2021, the European Digital Cleanup Challenge aimed to help each employee reduce their digital carbon footprint by 20% by targeting three areas: (1) Volume of stored emails; (2) Volume of stored files on Oracle Content; (3) Volume of data on work/private smartphones. The results were impressive! 115 Oracle employees cleaned up 781,47 GB of digital waste. 11 European countries participated in the challenge, plus other employees in Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Costa Rica and the United States joined the effort. And in 2022, from March 17 to end of April, the team has gone even bigger and has launched a Global Digital Cleanup Challenge, supported by a wonderful tool developed by Steven Wadsworth: you can join this wonderful challenge here!

Bec Sigrist is a community program lead within the Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit and leads the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Green Team. Bec participates, coordinates, and collaborates on environmentally and community focused initiatives that educate, inspire, and encourage people to increase their impact. Some of her campaigns include ocean clean ups, a sustainable focused culinary masterclass, growing plants in urban environments as well as collaborating with a rescue shelter to re-design their website and raise funds for the ongoing preservation of Australian wildlife. At Oracle, Bec is a Strategic Customer Success Manager and is committed to helping customers leverage Oracle solutions to reach their environment, social and governance targets. She holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) specializing in Sustainable Business.

Curious about finding out how things work, Housam Ziad started fixing broken home appliances at an early age. Later, this turned into a passion for protecting the environment by repairing, repurposing, or upcycling broken appliances, especially electronics. A few years ago, Housam started a small group of DIYers and makers to help the elderly get their electrical devices fixed for free. After some time, the effort expanding to gathering unwanted, broken items, fixing them, and donating them to charities or someone in need. After a pause due to COVID-19, Housam is planning to launch a city-council initiative.

Over the last year, Sarah Berry has implemented sustainability-focused projects such as outdoor waste bin cameras that help track contamination and a cigarette recycling program through TerraCycle that turns the material into plastic pellets and recycles them into commodity items like ashtrays and lunch boxes. The program began in November 2021 and has since expanded from the Bay Area region to 22 sites across North America. Additionally, she became a Fitwel Ambassador to help lead the Redwood Shores Fitwel Site 2-Star certification achievement. Outside of work, Sarah achieved a Master in Local Sustainability Certification by attending an 8-week night course offered remotely by San Mateo County's Office of Sustainability. The course required 40 hours of community service, which she accomplished by organizing over 15 local litter pickups and participating in the Office of Sustainability's Foodware Aware Program conducting outreach to local restaurants about plastic food accessory waste prevention. 

Under Kishan Rao’s leadership, the Oracle Tech Hub campus in Bengaluru installed a rooftop rainwater harvesting system, which now delivers a substantial water supply for the campus. Rainwater from the building’s rooftop terrace is captured and collected in collection sumps and treated at a local water treatment plant. The water is returned to the Oracle Tech Hub where it is used for domestic purposes such as handwashing, drinking and cooking. In addition to the rainwater harvesting system, excess runoff from the campus streets, parking lots, sidewalks, podiums, and landscape areas has previously routed to external stormwater and municipal drains. No longer! The surplus runoff water is now diverted and stored in water tanks at a local sewage treatment plant, where is it used for landscaping and toilet flushing. With this initiative, the Oracle Tech Hub in Bengaluru did not purchase water between July 2021 and November 2021, saving approximately 1,880 kiloliters of water.