Environment: Facilities

Our Global Real Estate (GRE) Services division is responsible for our worldwide real estate and construction activities, including the purchase and sale of land and buildings and the planning, construction, leasing, subleasing and renovation of our owned and leased facilities. GRE continues to assess its portfolio and implement programs to reduce energy and water use, decrease waste and increase recycling worldwide. These efforts included:

• Implementing architectural design and engineering standards to drive efficiency and performance in the work environment
• Continuing to maintain green buildings in our portfolio and meeting international green construction standards in new projects
• Partnering with environmentally responsible commercial real estate companies and service providers to improve our environmental footprint
• Developing renewable energy projects to generate low carbon emissions solutions
• Developing a green janitorial program that implements the use of nontoxic and environmentally neutral cleaning products
• Conducting waste audits at all our facilities to reduce waste and increase recycling

Additional 2011 highlights include:

• GRE has two landfill avoidance programs in our Hightstown, N.J. and Canary Wharf, U.K. facilities. In 2011, close to 60 tons of wet garbage was composted.
• In the U.S. over 1,500 tons of material was aggregated for recycling
• In 2011, GRE completed two large-scale light retrofitting projects in Whitby, Canada and Standard & Poor’s building in New York
• Two electric vehicle charging stations were installed at the J.D. Power and Associates site at Westlake Village, California.

GRE continues to evaluate new construction projects along international green construction standards. In 2011, our office in Dubuque, Iowa received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star status and was awarded Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Our state-of-the-art eco-friendly CRISIL House building in Mumbai, India was opened in 2010. The CRISIL House design used recyclable, renewable and locally available material, reducing its carbon footprint. The building has multiple natural elements, including a large green cover and a roof garden to ensure minimal CO2 emissions. It was constructed using wood from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forests and is implementing rain water harvesting.

GRE began building a 14.1 Megawatt solar field in 2011 at our East Windsor, N.J. campus in collaboration with NJR Clean Energy Ventures. The solar field is the largest privately owned, net-metered solar project in the Western Hemisphere. Spanning 50 acres, the renewable energy produced by the project will reduce McGraw-Hill's annual global carbon emissions by close to 10 percent. The solar field was completed in February 2012.

In 2011, McGraw-Hill’s offices in Maidenhead and Wooburn Green in the U.K. achieved ISO 14001 Environmental Certification, an internationally recognized framework for environmental management. The offices implemented a series of environmental initiatives to improve all aspects of their operations and the process required to obtain the certification covered a range of factors, including environmental impacts, training, communication, monitoring and auditing. The ISO 14001 certification is another step in GRE’s ongoing commitment to implement green initiatives into the global portfolio of McGraw-Hill locations.

Through our Green Fleet Initiative, McGraw-Hill reduced the carbon emissions from its fleet of cars by 16 percent over the past three years in partnership with its provider, Automotive Resources International. Close to 50 percent of our fleet was converted to vehicles that use alternative fuel sources. These efforts continue to bring positive environmental impact. In 2011, there were 7,832 tons of CO2 emitted, down from the 8,716 emitted in 2010.

All of the materials used to package and ship our products are recyclable. We use corrugated shipping cartons that contain an average of 40 percent recycled material; the paper we use to fill empty space in boxes (“void fill”) is 100 percent recycled.

In 2011, we used 2.3 million shipping cartons down from 2.84 million in 2010. We not only ship products using corrugated cartons and plastic wrap, but we also receive products that use these materials. In 2011, we recycled a total of 1,449 tons of corrugation and 67 tons of plastic wrap, and diverted 1,535 tons of waste from landfill.