As of today, many of those phone-line repair vans you see on the streets of your neighborhood are about to get quite a bit greener, as part of a major commitment announced by AT&T. To get more details, GreenBiz.com's executive editor Joel Makower, spoke about the project with Jerome Webber, AT&T's vice president of fleet operations, and Beth Shiroishi, the company's Executive Director of Citizenship and Sustainability.

Joel Makower: Jerome, why don't you start with giving just the basics of what AT&T has just announced?

Jerome Webber: AT&T has just announced a major commitment to deploying alternative fuel vehicles. That commitment is a $565 million commitment over the next ten years to deploy more than 15,000 alternative fuel vehicles consisting of compressed natural gas, as well as electric hybrids within this fleet, again, over the next ten years.

JM: It breaks down to about 8,000 compressed natural gas vehicles and about 7,100 ...

JW: It's 7,000 on the passenger vehicles for electric hybrids.

JM: These are gonna be used by your sales team and your -- for what purposes, exactly?

JW: On the passenger car commitment, and again, the passenger car commitment basically is involving a little bit more than 7,000 passenger vehicles over the next ten years. That means, as we retire passenger vehicles, we will no longer be replacing them with a conventional gasoline version. We will be buying and replacing them with an alternative fuel replacement vehicle. Those passenger vehicles are used throughout AT&T across all of the nation for our sales, marketing, public affairs, as well as our supervisors who keep our telecommunications network intact; as well as in a lot of other supervision and supervisory roles.

JM: The 8,000 CNG vehicles are more vans?

JW: The 8,000 CNG vehicles, yeah, those vehicles are focused towards our network operations organization that's responsible for the installation and maintenance of the network from a wireless standpoint, and also a wireline perspective.

JM: What led up to this? Why did you decide, of all the commitments that you could be making, to go with this one?

JW: What led up to this, if I can take a moment and just kind of go back for a moment, I'll start with back in 2007, we developed a long-term business plan that looked at what should we be doing in the alternative fuel space. As a result of that business plan, we launched a pilot project in the 2008 timeframe which deployed a little more than 100 electric hybrid and CNG vehicles, more specifically, 105. Positive results from that pilot were confirmed later in the year, so with the early results coming back so favorable, we felt confident that we could substantially increase the number of alternative fuel vehicles in our fleet.

Before the end of the year, we were asked for a recommendation by our senior leadership relative to expanding the project beyond the 105, and oh boy, we definitely expanded it much beyond the 105.

Bottom line, this is all about a long-term commitment and a long-term strategy for us to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to get behind sustainability and move at it with a pretty good pace. We also hope by doing this that we will signal demand and convey to the U.S. automakers that there is a market for more fuel-efficient work vehicles.

JM: Why is that something that AT&T wants to take on specifically?

JW: What specific ...

JM: I'm sorry, the signaling of demand.

JW: Oh, the signal of demand. Yes, from a couple of perspectives. You know, the country hears a lot about alternative fuel vehicles and hybrids, and those types of things. We have one of the largest fleets in the nation. Not the largest, but one of the largest. For a good segment of my fleet, which consists of a little shy of 89,000 vehicles, for a good segment of that fleet there is no alternative fuel solution for a lot of the work vehicles. With that, we wanted to make sure that we are moving down a path and signaling to the market and to the industry that AT&T is serious about looking for more fuel-efficient work vehicles, and this announcement solidifies that.