Insuring a Better FutureHelping OthersBeing Sustainable

Taking care of the world we share

Our carbon footprint primarily reflects our use of physical space, energy and fuel.

We manage our buildings, equipment, fleet and resources conscientiously and effectively to meet business needs, reduce our carbon footprint and limit our environmental impact.

We continue to make strides in energy conservation, paper use, recycling and other areas with the help of our customers and those we work with.

Every effort, no matter how big or small, makes a difference.

  • By using our space more efficiently, offering flexible work arrangements and reducing our surplus space, we reduced our real estate footprint in 2011 by 837,608 square feet.
  • We installed equipment for a free-cooling system in one of our Cleveland locations in 2011. Free cooling is a process by which we use the low-temperature outdoor air to chill the water in our air conditioning systems. This change has already resulted in significant savings in energy use and costs.
  • We implemented electronic medical recordkeeping in Texas and Tampa with the hope to improve patient care and decrease our carbon footprint by producing less paper.
  • We installed variable frequency drives (VFD) at our Cleveland and Colorado Springs data centers. Using VFDs, we vary the speed of the fans that cool our IT equipment, reducing energy consumption through our air conditioning units by about 80 percent at both data centers.
  • In April, we kicked off a new Plant-a-Tree campaign for agency customers in Florida, Louisiana and Pennsylvania and for those in North Carolina and California who buy directly from us. We promised to have a tree planted for every Progressive agency auto customer in these states who enrolled in our Paperless and e-Signature options. Partnering with the National Arbor Day Foundation, we’re planting more than 80,000 trees based on this campaign.
  • We saved 5,757,199 kWh in electric energy use. Since 2007, our annual savings have resulted in more than a 25% reduction.
  • To further improve energy efficiency, we implemented critical zone reset technology in our Phoenix call center, where the system resets the supply-air-temperature set point based on temperature in the designated “critical” zone (the zone at greatest risk of overcooling and activating local reheat).
  • In October, we sent emails to our customers in New York, California, North Carolina and Oregon to let them know that we were planting 100,000 trees as an expression of gratitude for their business.
  • We incorporated energy efficient design methodology in the design of new facilities and service centers to be built in 2012 and 2013.
  • Corporate Sourcing continued their effort to replace various printing equipment with Konica Minolta multi-functional devices (MFDs). These MFD devices enable high speed printing (color or black and white), and copying from one machine. Both faxing and scanning options have been enabled in approved areas as well. The majority of machines have been set to default to black and white, double-sided printing to reduce costs related to toner and paper use. By late 2011, all regional and House Counsel offices across the country were connected for a savings of $3,651,406. Savings were generated by an overall reduction in hardware, toner and paper usage.
  • Employees across locations collected shoes, eyeglasses, batteries and cell phones to send to recycling organizations who repurpose them as part of our annual Environmental Awareness Week in April.
  • We continued to replace six-cylinder vehicles in our company fleet with four-cylinder vehicles to reduce our impact on the environment. (See related chart under Numbers.)