TELUS goes dark in support of Earth Hour 2009

Vancouver, B.C. – This Saturday night TELUS and its team members will join tens of thousands of businesses and millions of people around the world by turning out the lights for 60 minutes in support of Earth Hour 2009.

TELUS will turn off all non-essential lights at 8:30 p.m. local time, Saturday night at 37 of its major buildings across Canada in response to Earth Hour 2009’s global call to action against global warming.

“We are striving to be a leading corporate citizen,” says Josh Blair, executive vice-president, TELUS Human Resources. “Our support of Earth Hour 2009 demonstrates our corporate awareness of and commitment to environmental issues. But while Earth Hour gives corporations a role to play, it is, more importantly, a grassroots initiative. As we did last year, my family and I are going to participate this year and I encourage all Canadians to do the same.”

More than 2,400 cities in 83 countries around the globe will be participating in Earth Hour 2009.

TELUS is also inviting its 35,000 team members to get involved and turn out the lights at their homes, turn off unnecessary lights and other electricity-consuming devices during the same time for an hour on Saturday night in support of the cause.

TELUS is happy to support Earth Hour 2009 and we are very proud of our commitment to the environment and to the communities where our team members live, work and serve. From our involvement in Earth Hour 2009 to our nationwide park and river valley clean-ups on TELUS Day of Service; from planting trees in Montreal green spaces to environmental considerations integrated into the business decisions we make, TELUS recognizes the responsibility we hold in exploring new opportunities to improve our environmental performance.

More on Earth Hour can be found online at www.earthhour.org.

Green Acts at TELUS

TELUS has made green initiatives an enterprise-wide priority with the environment being the theme of its annual TELUS Day of Service in both 2007 and 2008. More than 8,600 team members, family, friends and alumni participated in the 2008 TELUS Day of Service, volunteering an average of three hours to support local environmental organizations and community programs. In 2009, TELUS Day of Service will be held May 31.

In 2008, TELUS’ partnership with Tree Canada supported the planting of more than 170,000 trees. We also partnered with Markets Initiative to develop responsible paper procurement practices and reduce our internal paper consumption by more than 20 per cent in 2008.

TELUS introduced our Workstyles program in 2007, and throughout 2008, we continued to enhance its scale and scope. Workstyles provides employees with the opportunity to work whenever and wherever they need to, maximize their effectiveness, and track the economic, social and environmental benefits. The result of this effort has been greater flexibility and balance for our team members, reduced emissions, and a terrific opportunity to reduce our real estate footprint thereby minimizing our environmental footprint.

We are celebrating a growing culture of reducing, reusing and recycling at TELUS. Through our Handset Recycling Program, we recovered thousands of handsets in 2008. We also donated thousands of units of electronic equipment to the Federal Computers for Schools program.

About TELUS
TELUS (TSX: T, T.A; NYSE: TU) is a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, with $9.7 billion of annual revenue and 11.6 million customer connections including 6.1 million wireless subscribers, 4.2 million wireline network access lines and 1.2 million Internet subscribers. Led since 2000 by President and CEO, Darren Entwistle, TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services including data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, entertainment and video. In support of our philosophy to give where we live, TELUS, our team members and retirees have contributed $135 million to charitable and not-for-profit organizations and volunteered more than 2.6 million hours of service to local communities since 2000. Nine TELUS Community Boards across Canada lead our local philanthropic initiatives. For more information about TELUS, please visit telus.com.