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EPA and Federal Partners Kick Off Year-Long Effort To “Green Up” Civil Servants in Boston

Release Date: 04/20/2007
Contact Information: David Deegan, (617) 918-1017

(Boston, Mass. – April 20, 2007) – Federal employees in the Boston area are being asked to do their part for a cleaner environment.

EPA regional administrator Robert Varney this week greeted postal workers arriving for their workday at Boston’s main mail facility, and requested that they join national efforts to learn about and apply environmental awareness to their daily lives – both at work and at home.

Varney was joined by the Postmaster of Boston at the launch of a major federal partnership between EPA New England and the Greater Boston Federal Executive Board on a year-long campaign to educate federal employees about everyday choices they can make to improve the environment.

“We are eager to work with our partner federal agencies to help the 35,000 Boston-area federal civil servants better understand how our daily actions can lead to a cleaner environment,” said Robert W. Varney, regional administrator of EPA’s New England office. “However, our campaign doesn’t end on Earth Day – EPA New England employees will be back in these federal buildings every month, bringing a new environmental message to the federal family.”

EPA New England employees also fanned out to federal office buildings in the Boston area to greet the federal family with an Earth Day challenge to take the pledge to change at least one light bulb in their home to a compact fluorescent bulb.

EPA will calculate the energy savings from the pledges made by federal employees. If all 35,000 federal employees took the pledge – and changed just one incandescent bulb to a compact fluorescent - we would save almost $450,000 each year on our electric bills while preventing more than 4.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking more than 400 cars off the road for a year.

"The Greater Boston Federal Executive Board is delighted to partner with EPA for the next year to help federal workers make a positive difference for the environment. We look forward to a busy year of greening our workforce," said Diane LeBlanc, Chair of the Greater Boston Federal Executive Board.

"We at GSA practice energy savings for our customers, benefiting the environment and the taxpayer. We are pleased to partner with EPA, FEB, and other agencies to promote education and awareness programs for customer agencies and the general public," remarked Dennis R. Smith, Regional Administrator, US General Services Administration.

Since 2002, EPA has taken a hard look at the environmental impacts of our day-to-day work, and how we can reduce use of resources such as energy, paper, etc. EPA New England is working to prevent pollution and conserve natural resources in our own operations. We scrutinize the choices we make, from how we light our buildings, to the cars in our official fleet, to the amount of waste our office generates – and we’re changing how we get things done. We’ve now created a Web site to share this effort with other organizations.

More information: How EPA New England Walks the Talk (epa.gov/ne/green)

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