1.17.2008 - 08:55am ET

(CSRwire) WASHINGTON, DC - January 17, 2008 – BetterWorld Telecom, a nationwide full-service voice and data telecommunications services carrier based in Reston, Virginia, has received Zerofootprint's certification as the first telecom provider in North America to achieve carbon-neutral status. Zerofootprint, based in Toronto, Canada, is an organization that provides information, products and services to people and businesses working to reduce their environmental impact.

A new voice in the $900 billion US telecom services market, BetterWorld Telecom is strongly committed to the environment in its own daily internal business operations and actively helps its customers follow suit by offering a menu of service solutions to help organizations and businesses maintain sustainability. In addition to reducing its ecological impact along every step of the product and service delivery process, BetterWorld focuses on serving businesses and organizations that support social justice and sustainability while donating 3% of its revenues to causes that benefit children, education, fair trade, and of course, the environment.

"BetterWorld Telecom is now the first carbon-neutral telecom carrier in North America," explains Matt Bauer, president and co-founder of BetterWorld. "We have teamed with Zerofootprint to calculate and offset our carbon emissions and we couldn’t be more pleased with earning this very important distinction from this very innovative organization."

"We take our commitment to the environment so seriously that we have made every effort to minimize our carbon footprint to the fullest extent possible," continues Bauer. "The carbon emissions from all the paper we use in our office, for our newsletter, for billing purposes, as well as the carbon emissions associated with our office electricity, heating and employee travel have all been mitigated through offsetting." These impacts will be balanced out using ISO 14064-part 2 reforestation carbon offsets, which will help revitalize degraded ecosystems and soak up the CO2 we’ve produced."

"I couldn’'t be more proud of our team for their dedication and hard work by achieving this special certification through a combination of our web-based infrastructure, environmental offsets and proactive environmental business practices. By engaging in these activities, we will reduce our environmental impact, help limit BetterWorld Telecom's contribution to climate change, and hopefully encourage others — whether within or outside the telecommunications industry — to join us in this global fight to save the environment."

Bauer explains that achievement of the carbon-neutral status was only the first step in an ongoing commitment towards environmentally sustainable operations. Future goals include working with the US Green Building Council to develop telecoms as a LEED certification component, developing a "telecom offset" for all of our customers' usage, rolling out an employee home/personal offset program by 2009, as well as becoming 100% environmentally neutral through core business practices and offsets by 2010.

Zerofootprint combines the best financial engineering, environmental engineering, social networking tools and business intelligence to create products and services that help large corporations, organizations and individuals significantly reduce their environmental footprint. To learn more, please visit www.zerofootprint.net.

BetterWorld Telecom

Designed from the start as a triple-bottom-line company, BetterWorld Telecom actively promotes people and planet alongside profits, as it advocates for social justice and sustainability in the hundreds of communities where it provides service today. BetterWorld offers a "boutique" experience for its customers matching personalized service with full-service provider products ranging from long-distance, to 800 toll-free, local calling, conferencing, dedicated Internet, unified communications, virtual PBX and VoIP. BetterWorld is the first telecommunications carrier in North America to achieve the Zerofootprint carbon neutral certification, while it has also donated 3% of top line revenues to causes that support social justice and sustainability. For more information, go to www.betterworldtelecom.com

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