“Carbon Neutral” Rails Hosting 23 Dec 08
Over the next few months, I’d like to highlight via our blog a few aspects of Brightbox which may not be immediately obvious.
The first of these is our commitment to minimise the environmental impact of our business. Since we launched Brightbox in September 2007, we have offset the CO2 emissions from operating our business through our partnership with Climate Care. Our offsetting covers emissions from the following…
- Energy used at our datacentres
- Energy used for lighting and electricity at our office
- Travel by Brightbox staff to and from our datacentres
- Travel by Brightbox staff to events, conferences and meetings
- Commuting by Brightbox staff from home to office
As expected, the largest contributor of these is electricity used at our datacentres. We’re constantly working on improving energy efficiency and we’ll go into more depth about that in a future post.
Climate Care invest our offset payments into green energy and energy efficiency around the world. We specifically chose to work with Climate Care due to their common sense principles and standards, here’s a taster:
- all the emissions reductions we pay for go over and above what would have happened without our intervention
- their projects are undertaken outside countries that have legally binding commitments under the Kyoto Protocol – we don’t feel it’s our job to help governments reach their legally binding targets
- for each project a third party is engaged to monitor the project to ensure that the expected emissions reductions are being made.
Most Carbon offsetting programmes seem to be focused almost entirely on planting trees – which is fairly low down on Climate Care’s list of priorities. In fact, their portfolio for 2007/08 didn’t actually include any reforestation projects. Here’s a snippet from an interview last year with Stella Bell of Climate Care:
Firstly, I’d like to make the point that offsetting is not about planting trees (although there are a lot of companies out there who would try to convince you otherwise). For example if you wanted to offset the UK’s emissions for a year, you’d need to plant an area the size of about Devon and Cornwall with trees, and then ensure that they didn’t die, become diseased, get chopped or burnt down for the life of the offset (anything between 50 and 100 years) – the following year you’d need to find another piece of land the same size and start again. This is not something we can plant our way out of, so we should be focusing our efforts – as Climate Care is – on funding renewable energy and energy efficiency which reduce dependency on fossil fuels.
As you’ve probably seen, we’ve been providing Ubuntu packages for