Being Green at work

During 2005 the company I work for became Carbon Neutral by offsetting it's carbon by partnering with the Carbon Neutral Company http://www.carbonneutral.com/. I know there has been some bad press recently about off setting carbon but it is a start and stepping stone to the next stage.

We also purchase our electricity from a Green energy supplier.

In May this year the company I work for signed up for H.R.H. Prince of Wales pledge to become a "May Day Company" http://www.bitc.org.uk/what_we_do/may_day/index.html

Being Head of I.T Services I have responsibility for the I.T. Infrastructure

During 2006 we replaced our I.T Infrastructure replacing over 4,500 P.C's (using on average 180 Watts 24 x 7 = 168 hours per week) with 4,500 Wyse V30 Thin Client Terminals using 17.2 Watts 50 hours per week. We also switched to Citrix and VMWARE using 64 bit HP Blade servers. The result has been a reduction of over 400 servers through 64 bit computing, Citrix and VMWARE retirement and consolidation.

We are making good improvements into making our data centres Green. We maximize use of air conditioning using cold and hot isles and have increased the temperature from 18-19C to 22C .

Last year we reduced one of data centres power requirements by 188,000 KwH but this is just the start.

During 2006 we switched all printing and photo copying to duplex/double sided. Considering we print 29 million pages per year this is massive reduction in paper.

As a Green champion in the company I work for we plan many more initiatives over the next year and plan to publicly state a carbon reduction target we will work towards.

More of this in later posts....