The Oracle sustainability team recently held a call for nominations for Oracle employees whose efforts to bring their sustainability ideas to work deserve to be recognized. There was a tremendous response with many examples of environmentally focused activities from Oracle employees around the globe. The Oracle sustainability team would like to recognize these individual contributions as part of our 2021 Oracle Sustainability Champions initiative. Here’s how those champions are reducing Oracle’s footprint throughout the world:
Mayra Acosta and Asuzena Ortiz Castro (Zapopan, Mexico)
One of several environmental projects underway at the Oracle Mexico Development Center, an onsite composting program is being lead by IT senior project managers Mayra Acosta and Asuzena Ortiz Castro. Working closely with the Real Estate and Facilities team, Mayra and Asuzena created a dedicated composting area at the Zapopan campus. Their efforts include providing webinars, taking and giving courses, and offering composting advice. For over a year, Mayra and Asuzena have been tracking the quantity of organic waste transformed into compost, rather than ending up in landfill. They send Slack messages to encourage their colleagues to start home composting. Their hard work has positively impacted the community’s treatment of waste and highlighted the need for everyone to reduce their environmental footprint.
Sarah Berry (Redwood City, California, United States)
Sarah Berry is the assistant facility manager at the Oracle Redwood Shores campus and is also an active member of the Real Estate and Facilities (RE&F) Energy, Water, and Waste Pillars. Sarah recently stepped up to be the new leader of the RE&F Water Pillar and is making a considerable impact toward Oracle's sustainability efforts. Sarah is also an active volunteer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Matthew Bickham and Laura-Ann Stutz (Cambridge and London, UK)
CX Consulting Practice Director Matthew Bickham and EMEA Social Media Lead Laura-Ann Stutz created a solution that enables employees to compare their personal habits against sustainability best practices to help reduce waste and meet corporate targets. Built using the latest version of Oracle Intelligent Advisor, the easy-to-use solution enables employees to evaluate their habits—good and bad—around travel, recycling, and reduction of waste to help them change and improve. The solution is built in a zero-code environment, so companies can easily extend and enhance it without technical expertise. It is available online for review.
Craig Brown (Linlithgow, UK)
Working with Oracle’s key logistics partners, Supplier Program Manager Craig Brown has been consistently working to improve the reporting of Oracle’s logistics-related emissions, and find ways to reduce those emissions. Since 2015, through a combination of improving efficiencies, streamlining planning and consolidation, and identifying more sustainable transportation options (such as the use of Bio-LNG), Craig has helped Oracle reduce carbon emissions from our logistics supply chain operations and improved the accuracy of Oracle’s emissions reports.
Luiz Esposel (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Regional Real Estate and Facilities Director Luiz Esposel showed great leadership by achieving the 2020 sustainability goals set for the Oracle Latin America Division (LAD)—18 months ahead of schedule. As part of that effort, he instituted a recycling program throughout the region, with all LAD offices going “binless” (moving waste collection away from employees’ desks and into a common, centralized location). Luiz continues to report and communicate progress to staff to keep the momentum going, representing LAD in Oracle Real Estate and Facilities’ Energy Pillar and Environmental Reporting. He will be leading the charge for LAD’s 2025 goals.
Poppy Harris (Reading, UK)
Poppy Harris is the EMEA sustainability manager, so environmental policy is her day job. But she goes above and beyond by being a highly active and valued member of three Oracle Real Estate and Facilities groups focused on waste, energy, and water policy. Outside of work, she volunteers on the board of the Reading Climate Change Partnership, helping to make Reading a climate-resilient town with net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Although she has been with Oracle for less than two years, she has made a significant impact toward achieving Oracle's sustainability goals.
Tania Le Voi (Reading, UK)
Passionate about sailing and the environment, Tania Le Voi has carried this enthusiasm into her work as a strategy leader for Oracle Digital. Tania looks for innovative ways to incorporate sustainability messaging so that it resonates with Oracle customers. This includes helping Oracle Digital deliver international hackathons with partners and customers who focus on sustainability development challenges. For example, she worked on a climate change hackathon with the Ministry of Public Administration of Slovenia. Participants used Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other Oracle solutions to develop applications to address climate change challenges. The Republic of Slovenia government supports World Bee Day, so it was a perfect opportunity to build connections on “tech for good,” and how Oracle and the World Bee Project use AI to save bees. Currently, Tania is planning sustainability-focused events with customers and partners, and is looking into more ways to train technology sales reps on how they can talk about sustainability with their customers.
Luke Mann (Arlington, Virginia, United States)
Luke Mann is part of the Opower team within the Oracle Utilities global business unit and advocates for Oracle to reduce the emissions from employee air travel. After helping to research the current impact of air travel, Luke determined the key drivers in the industry, as well as how Oracle can reduce our impact in the future. Working with the Oracle Travel and Oracle Global Sustainability teams, Luke helped put forward a proposal that resulted in Oracle setting a new goal for a 25% reduction in employee air- travel–related emissions by 2025 compared to a 2019 pre-COVID baseline.
Paul Mardle (Ipswich, UK)
In the fall of 2020, Enterprise Architect Leader Paul Mardle led a two-day workshop for Oracle UK team members on how to engage with customers on their sustainability needs. The consultants in the workshop completed hands-on exercises related to case studies from various industries. Oracle employees can get a certificate by completing four courses focused on how sustainability/environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues affect our customers; how technology can be leveraged to mitigate and reverse these issue;, and how to position Oracle technology with our customers to help manage ESG issues. As a result, Paul now leads a team of 10 consultants and architects in the creation of a program and tools that will allow Oracle Consulting to design, operate, and maintain solutions for our customers to increase their ability to assess, measure, and improve sustainability.
Oleg Šelajev (Tallinn, Estonia)
Oleg Šelajev is an Oracle developer advocate for GraalVM Enterprise, which is now part of the Java SE Subscription and improves Java application performance with no code changes. Oleg runs meetups with other experts where the environmental impact of faster runtimes is often discussed. He helps to communicate that applications running on GraalVM Enterprise need less CPU, memory, and energy to do the same amount of work, reducing the ever-increasing demand for more data centers and energy—without sacrificing performance. Faster, smarter, and leaner runtimes and continuous research in improving the performance of Oracle solutions has had a positive environmental impact on the whole industry.
Illustration: Wes Rowell
