IT Support: Going green by lowering EvolvIT's CO2 footprint

It is hard to ignore, we are all producing too muchconsultant at Rackspace regarding our thoughts
CO2. It could be from inefficient electrical usage,and explained what we are trying to achieve here
car usage or simply quantity of waste sent toat EvolvIT. We are glad to report Rackspace
landfill. Being a business we have a larger CO2take this just as seriously, see this green link for
footprint than most - and so wemore info!
have implemented as many procedures asThe last major point that became obvious was
possible to reduce the impact EvolvIT has onour responsibility for our customers equipment
our environment.power usage. We could simply set policies in place
Our main office is based in Bristol, however as wethat would make every machine use less power -
began looking into our carbon footprint a verybut we have to be mindful of our customers
simple question was asked "Why do we come toexisting policies and how they use their systems,
the office everyday, when 95% of our work isinternally and remotely. It was decided that the
done remotely?". Much head scratching ensuedbest way forward was education, and so an email
and no one could really see why a majority ofshot was sent to all our customers explaining
work could not be done from our home offices,simple - yet effective changes to usage and
of which all staff and directors have. A quickcomputer settings to make every machine use
calculation showed that EvolvIT travelled aless power and thus have a smaller CO2 footprint.
staggering 40,000 miles a year just to get to theSee the points below for other areas we have
office and back - that is almost 14 tonnes of CO2changed,
emissions. A policy with immediate effect was put- Bulbs replaced with energy efficient variations
into place to cut this by 80%, and has proved so- Scrap cardboard must be recycled, included
successful that we now do over 90% fewercustomer boxes when asked to remove
miles!- Paper to be shredded and recycled
We then turned to our suppliers, we must be- Company equipment to be configured for
responsible about who we purchase from as thatmaximum power savings when not in use
has just a big an affect as we do. One supplier- Replace battery wireless devices with
stood out as being particularly energy hungry.re-chargeable alternatives
That is ourhosting supplier, Rackspace. Over the- Supply only top rated low power screens and
years the number of servers we have hosteddevices We hope that with our tips above and
with Rackspace has grown to the point that wepush to be greener, other businesses can follow
cannot ignore the CO2 footprint those serverssuit in lowering their carbon footprint.
emit. We spoke with our business management