Green Tech

Google reached its goal of becoming carbon neutral for 2007 and is almost entirely neutral for 2008, Google's Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl announced on the official Google blog Wednesday evening.

In June 2007, Google had announced it was going to try to become carbon neutral by the end of that year by working to maximize its efficiency, investing in renewable energy resources, and as a last resort and interim solution buying carbon offsets.

In Wednesday evening's post announcing the company had finally achieved that goal, Weihl reiterated the company's 2007 promise of using carbon offsets was only a temporary fix and announced more initiatives towards long-term sustainability goals.

"While offsets with strong additionality can achieve real emissions reductions in unregulated sectors at a relatively low cost, we view them as a short-term solution for Google, not as a substitute for other action," said Weihl.

"In addition, we've set ourselves the ambitious goal of creating 50 megawatts of new renewable generation capacity--enough to power 50,000 typical U.S. homes--by 2012," he said.

Earlier this month, the company shared one of its quirkier Green alternative solutions: using goats to cuts the Mountain View, Calif., campus lawn.

As there is yet no legal standard on how a company must calculate its carbon footprint or an official U.S. carbon certifying agency, Google said in its June announcement that it would be hiring the Environmental Resources Trust to verify its yearly assessment . Google also stated that its global carbon footprint includes employee commuting and business travel, as well as Google company construction, server manufacturing, and electricity use.

So, how does this compare to others? Matching how Google stacks up against other big names in tech is difficult since everyone calculates things uniquely, as they do with recycling. Here's the available info on the carbon neutrality status of several big names in tech.

This past March, Microsoft announced on its sustainability blog that the company plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 30 percent compared with its 2007 levels, by 2012.

In August 2008, Dell announced that it was carbon neutral in terms of its global electricity use and in April 2008 announced that its U.S. headquarters, consisting of 2.1 million square feet and 10,000 employees, was powered by 100 percent green energy. It's striving to achieve carbon neutrality through a combination of efficiency practices and buying carbon offsets.

Hewlett-Packard has announced a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 16 percent from its 2005 levels before the end of 2010. About 99 percent of HP's greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity use, with only 1 percent coming from manufacturing and refrigeration equipment, according to HP. HP detailed that its official carbon footprint will include HP's owned and leased facilities' electricity use, natural gas use, manufacturing emissions, and refrigerant emissions. HP will not be including employee commuting, transport of its products, or the manufacturing of its suppliers in its carbon footprint, according to HP's "Global Citizenship Report 2008."

In May 2007, IBM held a press conference to announce that to help other companies become carbon neutral. Part of its promise is that it can help the average 25,000-square-foot data center cut its energy bills by 42 percent. Between 1990 and 2007, IBM reduced about 45 percent of the company's 1990 global CO2 emissions. It plans to reduce its energy use by 12 percent from its 2005 levels by 2012 through conservation, increased use of renewable energy, and buying Renewable Energy Certificates, according to the company materials on its environmental stance. It plans to reduce its total global GHG emissions by 7 percent from 2005 to 2012, according to a listing with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Comparing footprint size
You could keep sifting through all the corporate sustainability reports and get varying systems of carbon footprint measurements and statistics like those above for almost every tech company. There are some organizations that have tried to come up with a way to make it easier to compare.

The EPA lists companies that have joined its Climate Leaders initiative and their stated goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, but many companies simply have "greenhouse gas reduction goal is under development" next to their listing. The list also fails to specify what each company includes in its carbon footprint.

But according to that EPA list, Intel will reduce its global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30 percent per from 2004 to 2010; Cisco will reduce by 25 percent from 2007 to 2012; and Oracle plans to reduce "by 6 percent per square foot from 2003 to 2010 for all non-data center space and to purchase 5 percent green power for data centers." Sun Microsystems reduced U.S. GHG emissions by 23 percent from 2002 to 2007 and pledged to the EPA that it would reduced its global GHG emissions by 20 percent from 2007 to 2015.

In May 2008, Climate Counts, a nonprofit watch group funded by yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm that keeps scorecards on companies environmental records, released a list on tech and software companies' green achievements. Companies were rated by a points system and also placed into one of three (green, yellow or red) categories. IBM, Canon, Toshiba, Sony, HP, Motorola, Hitachi, Samsung, Siemens, and Google were put in the green category signaling companies with a good environmental record.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, and Nokia were put in the yellow category signaling that they had made a start, but still had work to do in certain areas.

Amazon.com, Apple, and eBay were placed in the red category which, according to Climate Counts' chart, stands for "This company is not yet taking meaningful action on climate change."

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If you've been to a trade show in the last few years, you've probably seen some egregious examples of waste: freebie bags stuffed to the gills with literature that is guaranteed to be thrown away; slick, glossy programs; and no hint of post-consumer paper in sight.

At Demo 09 here, however, I saw some encouraging signs that conference organizers interested in improving their green cred might want to copy.

In the past, Demo has always filled its goodie bag with one of those slick, thick, bound conference programs. It's certainly useful during the event, but afterward it becomes just another to throwout--hopefully into recycling, but probably not in most cases. The same went for the various magazines and other literature that filled the bag, and even the bag itself.

At Demo 09, attendees got a conference program that seems to have been printed on a standard laser printer. This is just one step towards a greener conference.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

At other shows, this can be even worse. I've talked to conference organizers about this and they've basically thrown their hands up, saying that they are aware of how much waste the materials attendees get present, but that because sponsors insist their literature or other materials are included, there's little that can be done to cut down on the endless piles of paper, mint tins, bad pens, and other nonsense that is handed out at each and every confab.

Here at Demo this week, however, it seems that green is in. For starters, the formerly slick, bound program has been replaced by one that looks like it was printed on a standard laser printer and then stapled together. Much better, in my opinion, though I admit that it feels a little informal.

But I'm more than happy to deal with informality in order to cut down on the waste factor. And while they could have used a photocopier instead of a printer (in order to double-side the program), this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Other green innovations for the conference include more post-consumer materials in the goodie bag, and the bag itself is something attendees can hold on to and add to their collection of bags to use when grocery shopping back home. There was one glossy, high-quality magazine in the bag, however, so there's room for more improvement.

"It's not easy being green," said Demo director Chris Shipley. "But we're trying, maybe you've seen that in the conference materials."

Shipley said that Demo is offsetting 1,000 tons of CO2 emissions, enough to cover the carbon cost of powering the show, as well as much of the attendees' travel to and from Palm Desert. This is all good news, and something I'm happy to see, and I hope this is going to become the norm across the conference industry.

To bolster the green argument, Shipley then introduced the German company, eFormic, which has developed an interesting and impressive concept: the CO2-neutral label.

This is something I hope we start to see on packaging throughout the consumer goods industry. The label, which eFormic showed on the back of an orange juice container, has a code unique to a product that can then be entered on eFormic's Web site in order to get a host of information about the carbon cost of the production of the product.

CO2code, from eFormic, gives companies a way to inform the public about the carbon cost of the products they make.

(Credit: eFormic)

By entering the code for, say, the orange juice, it is possible to see exactly how much CO2 was needed to make the product. The juice was responsible for seven ounces of CO2. But the eFormic site also then showcases what climate-improvement project can be joined in order to offset the carbon cost of producing the product. Visitors to the site can see, among other things, a Google map showing the location of such offset projects, as well as pictures of them.

Clearly, eFormic sees this as a value-add that companies looking to come across as greener than their competitors will put on their products. The benefits? Building costumer relationships and marketing opportunities, and giving companies a chance to enhance the public's perception of their social responsibility, eFormic argues.

And because everyone is cost-conscious these days, eFormic also argues that the cost of getting involved in this form of ecoconsciousness is inexpensive: as little as two cents per unit.

This is very good news, and I'm hopeful we'll start to see this kind of labeling (and the adjunct corporate attention to offsetting CO2 production) be as ubiquitous as the nutrition labeling on food products in the United States.

And as there is more and more green consciousness, I hope that we'll also see more conferences work to improve their efforts to cut down on the impact on the environment. We do have power to affect change, and if we work hard enough and fast enough, we may be able to turn things around and start to really address global warming.

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Dell has declared itself carbon-neutral, but good luck defining and auditing what that means exactly.

Assembling PCs at Dell's Hortolandia, Brazil, facility.

(Credit: Dell)

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story on Dell and its carbon-neutral efforts. In a nutshell:

• There is no standard definition of carbon neutral;
• Purchasing carbon credits is vital;
• But the markets for carbon credits isn't regulated and is also in flux;
• And finally there's debate over whether a vendor should count emissions from suppliers in its footprint.

Those points are notable for companies well beyond Dell. While Dell is certainly early with its carbon-neutral claim, other companies will soon follow. For now, green tech looks recession-proof. Get ready for the carbon neutral audits.

A few key excerpts from the Journal story:

The amount of emissions Dell has committed to neutralize is known in the environmental industry as the company's "carbon footprint." But there is no universally accepted standard for what a footprint should include, and so every company calculates its differently. Dell counts the emissions produced by its boilers and company-owned cars, its buildings' electricity use, and its employees' business air travel.

In fact, that's only a small fraction of all the emissions associated with Dell. The footprint doesn't include the oil used by Dell's suppliers to make its computer parts, the diesel and jet fuel used to ship those computers around the world, or the coal-fired electricity used to run them.

And.

Dell's drive offers an early road map of the thorny questions companies will face as they attempt the massive emission reductions scientists say are needed to curb global warming. In a global economy with so many interconnected players, figuring out who should be responsible for cutting which emissions -- and how to ensure those cuts happen -- is dizzyingly complicated.

Toss in nascent markets for buying carbon credits and you see a lot of confusion ahead. To make matters worse, companies don't have to file carbon neutrality reports that are under generally accepted principles. In other words, you won't find the details of carbon neutrality in an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In reality, none of this is surprising. Companies like Dell are ahead of the curve and in many respects make this carbon neutrality stuff up as they go along. As more companies start issuing carbon neutrality press releases, however, there will be a need to seriously vet these claims.

Dell has claimed it is now officially a carbon-neutral company--five months ahead of its own projected schedule.

Dell released this ultra-small green consumer desktop PC, called the Studio Hybrid, in July.

(Credit: Dell)

The target was apparently met through improved energy efficiency at Dell's own facilities, combined with "green" electricity purchases and investments in wind power in the U.S., China, and India, totaling 645 million kilowatt-hours and creating savings of 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Dell has invested $3 billion annually in green energy, and its consumption of green energy has increased almost tenfold to 116 million kWh in four years.

Dane Parker, Dell's global environment, health, and safety director, said the achievement reflects a long-established policy at Dell of saving energy, recycling, and other green practices.

Parker hailed the meeting of the target as an achievement that is "a major step forward in our commitment to become the greenest technology company on the planet and establishes our leadership position for others in the industry and all other industries across the globe."

He added: "The way energy costs are, they are just not sustainable, so, for business to be competitive in the future, we need constant supplies of green energy, and so we are trying to enable that everywhere we can globally."

But Dell's fanfare announcement was met with skepticism in some quarters. Clive Longbottom, of business and IT analyst firm Quocirca said: "It really worries me when companies claim they have achieved carbon neutrality, when it's really not possible."

"You have to question whether they have taken all their workers' commuting into consideration, and the materials (involved) in making a computer, going all the way back to zinc mining."

Longbottom continued: "Carbon neutrality is a large amount of greenwash. Computer companies should be focusing on the developments made in recent years in the reduction of harmful material inside the computers, and reduction in the power that computers use. With these high claims, companies are setting themselves up to be knocked back down again."

In addition, Dell also unveiled its partnership with Conservation International to preserve 591,000 acres of rain forest in Madagascar. It is hoped the project will prevent 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere over the next five years.

The project will also protect the habitat of two of the world's rarest primates, found only in Madagascar.

Toby Jansen Smith of Conservation International welcomed the partnership with Dell and highlighted the importance of the project in combating climate change.

He said: "Tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse emissions--much more than cars, trucks, and planes combined."

Neil Vowles of Silicon.com reported from London.