2021 Humana’s 2021 Impact Report

For the environment

Male employee working at an outside work station.

Humana’s commitment to the health of our planet is stronger than ever. We recognize there is an undeniable link between our physical and emotional well-being and the health of the environment. To that end, we are continuing to invest our time and resources where it matters most—not just because it’s good business practice, but because we believe in a bright future.

Humana's impact on the health of the environment is measured in one of our environment, social and governance (ESG) metrics categories:

Environmental impact.

Humana’s Workplace Solutions Environmental Sustainability team aims to support Humana’s lifelong well-being strategy by ensuring that we are doing our part to take on climate change, pollution and other environmental factors that impact our health. The team works with internal and external partners to develop environmental strategies for all areas of Humana, including reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and waste from our operations, deploying water conservation efforts, adopting renewable energy solutions, and benchmarking and publicly reporting our efforts as part of our ESG measurement strategy, PDF.

Humana is now working with a global leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation to create a more robust next generation goal that will align with the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) to address climate change. We expect to publicly announce our new SBTi aligned environmental goal in late 2022.

Douglas A Edwards, SVP, Enterprise Associate & Business Solutions.

Reducing emissions and diverting waste

Continuous investment and improvement in our facilities is critical to achieve energy efficient buildings, reduce the amount of energy we use and divert waste.

In 2018, Humana established next-generation goals to uphold our pledge to make the planet healthier. We are continuing to bring environmental sustainability to life in our business strategy through innovative programs and proven practices.

In 2021, keeping in line with best practices around goal setting, we expanded our goal boundary to include all Humana owned and leased properties and recalculated our goal progression over the last five years.

These are the goals we set out to achieve and the progress we made in 2021:

2021 Humana environmental impact metrics.
2021 Humana environmental impact metrics.

Paper reduction

Humana is working to save paper, in turn reducing print and postage costs $5 million by the end of 2023, by making it easier for customers to sign up for and receive paperless communications, in addition to transitioning more communications to digital channels.

More efficient buildings

Much of our effort has gone toward making Humana’s buildings more efficient. As a result of the pandemic, several of our buildings were temporarily shut down and put into “hibernation” to conserve energy while employees were working remotely. We took advantage of our empty buildings expedite repairs and replace equipment and infrastructure, which will result in a better employee experience and more energy-efficient buildings. As part of our efficiency work, we use certifications to benchmark how well our buildings are performing. Some certifications we are pursuing include:

ENERGY STAR Certification for Buildings—We’re continuing to replace all lights in all of our owned and leased facilities with LEDs and pursuing the goal of reaching ENERGY STAR certification in all eligible Humana locations. ENERGY STAR certified sites on average use 35% less energy than comparable sites.

Humana energy star certified work sites.
29 total Humana sites have been Energy Star certified.

Fitwel—Fitwel, originally created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a high-impact building approach and certification designed to support healthier workplace environments and improve occupant health and productivity. Humana’s buildings already incorporate many of the strategies recommended by Fitwel, and the company is on track to achieve certification for the Waterside building in Louisville in 2022.

TRUE Zero Waste Certification—In 2020, Humana targeted the West Chester, Ohio Pharmacy Distribution site to pursue our subset goal of zero waste certification and is on track to be a TRUE certified facility by the end of 2022. Humana is consistently hitting 85% waste diversion at this facility and will reach 90.1% waste diversion with the certification. Much of the credit goes to the leadership and employees at the West Chester facility.

Flexible ways of working translates to fewer emissions

Offering our employees flexibility in how they work was a hallmark of our company culture even before the pandemic.

In 2020, most of our employees worked from home due to COVID-19. This gave us the opportunity to Rethink Routine and surface additional ways to be more sustainable. We added a new metric and more robust methodology to the way we calculate employee work-at-home emissions. Like many companies, we didn’t include employee work-at-home emissions previously, but we did utilize reduced employee commute emissions in our calculations. Starting in 2021, we began measuring employee work-at-home emissions and expanding the education and programs to support our employees and reduce their emissions, as many Humana employees are expected to continue to work remotely in 2022 and beyond.

Flexible ways of working translates to fewer emissions.
In 2019, nearly 40% of our employee population worked in a flexible way.

Environmental reporting assurance

A third-party assurance contractor was employed by Humana, Inc. (“Humana”) to undertake the actions necessary to provide limited assurance verification of their GHG emissions for submission to the CDP. For more information on the assurance process and scope, see the statement of assurance, PDF.

Humana’s impact in the news

Humana’s impact in the news

Humana’s CDP Responses, PDF

Environmental year-over-year Data Inventory, PDF

Humana’s TCFD and other ESG Responses, PDF

Environmental Sustainability Policy, PDF

Humana’s 2021 Impact Report

Our impact report features activities, progress, metrics and performance for how Humana is advancing health equity, addressing needs in our communities and driving sustainable change with shared value. Download the 2021 Impact Summary here, PDF or download the full version below.

Download full 2021 impact report