Making a Difference in our Operations

Banking is not the kind of industry that conjures up images of severe environmental hazard. But as a global company we have a fairly significant environmental footprint. We measure and track a variety of environmental indicators like our GHG emissions, paper use, energy use and employee travel. Our efforts to reduce the intensity of our footprint are paying off and we’re committed to doing even better.

Priorities and Goals

The RBC Environmental Blueprint includes specific, long-term footprint reduction commitments for energy, greenhouse gas emissions, paper, travel, water, and waste.

RBC Environmental Blueprint: Footprint Reduction Commitments

Performance Measurement

We monitor and report progress against our footprint reduction commitments in our Blueprint Report Card. We also provide in-depth detail on key environmental indicators in our Operational Footprint Report.

Environmental Blueprint Report Card

Environmental Footprint Report

Initiatives

We constantly look for ways to reduce our impact and we focus our on-going initiatives on the following four areas, and we discuss these in the RBC Environmental Blueprint Report Card .

Greening our Real Estate

With over 20 million square feet of real estate, we are constantly looking for ways to reduce water and energy use. From occupying LEED buildings to implementing our energy management plan, we have a number of initiatives in place to reduce the impact of our real estate.

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Responsible Procurement

We purchased $5.9 billion of goods and services to run our business in 2012. We can use our purchasing power to transition our supply chain into a model that better supports environmental sustainability.

More Efficient Business Processes

RBC is a global business that operates every hour of every day. We have implemented a number of initiatives to help us streamline our operations so we can reduce environmental impacts and costs.

Greening IT

Approximately 13% of the energy used by RBC is to power our critical information technology (IT) infrastructure. We have a formal committee responsible not only for reducing this environmental footprint but also for leveraging technology to reduce environmental impacts across broader business operations.