With many companies around the world being under pressure to adopt environmentally-friendly practices while still reducing costs in challenging economic times, MTN South Africa has embarked on a mission to make its 14th Avenue head office completely environmentally friendly in the next two years.

The ‘Greening 14th Avenue’ initiative by MTN is being driven not by idealistic environmentalists, but by two senior executives who have combined their financial backgrounds with a passion for change that starts in MTN’s backyard. Now with approximately 17 million customers and thousands of employees across the country, MTN is set to give back and reduce its carbon footprint on a dramatic scale.

The idea for greening MTN started with taking a strategic, holistic view of the impact MTN has on the environment, and considering the processes to be followed to rectify this in an end-to-end manner rather than as a quick win initiative.

“Our main challenge was encapsulated in the questions: can we be environmentally friendly in our operations? And: what should we be doing about being greener?” says MTN chief financial officer Zunaid Bulbulia.

The initial analysis from the project team looking at greening MTN sought to address six environmental issues for the 14th Avenue head office: sustainable sites, energy consumption, water efficiency and quality, indoor environmental quality, innovation in design, and the recycling of material and resources.

“When we received the findings from our project team, we decided this would not be a project that gets put on the backburner,” Bulbulia says. “Our energy consumption is high, especially in our data centres, and we are emitting tons of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. We’re also using substantial amounts of water to cool and power our data centre.

But things are starting to change for the better. Today, MTN uses only what it calls “grey water” – recycled water – and is looking to expand such systems to improve cooling and indoor systems.

Furthermore, MTN is actively attempting to reduce the number of cars parking at its 14th Avenue headquarters. With 6 000 employees on campus, a significant number of them still opt to drive to work. The Phase Two parking area alone stretches as far as the N1 highway.

“When you see the numbers, you stop to think hard about what you can do,” continues chief financial officer Zunaid Bulbulia. “We are led to believe that 433 000 trees per year are being destroyed in our operations – that has to change!” In this regard, MTN is making further adjustments and today prints its brochures and booklets on recycled paper.

The first phase of the environmental sustainability project will be addressing the energy and water consumption, and procurement policy development to ensure the continuous procurement of green and environment friendly products; R1.5-million has already been earmarked for this leg of the project.

The more ambitious second phase will see MTN bringing in more capital intensive equipment such as solar panels for heating of water and energy production at a cost of up to R40-million. This leg of the project is scheduled to be completed within twelve months after completion of the first phase.

“We are the first listed company to issue a full sustainability report on the JSE as part of our company profile,” Bulbulia says. “We will now be the first in South Africa to convert an existing building to incorporate eco-friendly systems, and the first to seek the American LEED accreditation. Luckily it’s easier for us to convert as the 14th Avenue building belongs to us, but we’ll have to be more creative when we roll out to other spaces and engage with those building owners,” Bulbulia adds.

The much-revered LEED accreditation is traditionally an extremely tough certificate to attain and reflects that the holder has complied with stringent environmentally-friendly measures in its operations. If MTN is able to complete the project guided by the LEED recommendations, this initiative may serve as the blueprint for similar projects in South Africa.

As part of being proactive in this environment, MTN has also become a founding member of the Green Building Council of South Africa, which underscores its commitment to the improvement of the environment and to creating a better workplace for all employees.

“It’s very important that we establish and motivate for a project that is self-supporting. The commercial value we get back from going green makes up sufficiently for the initial investment,” Bulbulia says. “We’ve created an internal, dedicated structure to tackle the first phase of the greening project, so we should be able to get the results from the project team in February 2010. From there, we’ll implement phase one until June 2010,” Bulbulia adds.

Bulbulia believes there’s a 30 percent saving in using greener technology as opposed to relying power utility Eskom, which is planning a series of electricity hikes. The timing couldn’t have been any better.

“If we get our power usage down by about 30 percent, then we’ve achieved something tremendous,” Bulbulia says.