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

It is hard to ignore, we are all producing too much CO2. It could be from inefficient electrical usage, car usage or simply quantity of waste sent to landfill. Being a business we have a larger CO2 footprint than most - and so we have implemented as many procedures as possible to reduce the impact EvolvIT has on our environment.

Our main office is based in Bristol, however as we began looking into our carbon footprint a very simple question was asked "Why do we come to the office everyday, when 95% of our work is done remotely?". Much head scratching ensued and no one could really see why a majority of work could not be done from our home offices, of which all staff and directors have. A quick calculation showed that EvolvIT travelled a staggering 40,000 miles a year just to get to the office and back - that is almost 14 tonnes of CO2 emissions. A policy with immediate effect was put into place to cut this by 80%, and has proved so successful that we now do over 90% fewer miles!

We then turned to our suppliers, we must be responsible about who we purchase from as that has just a big an affect as we do. One supplier stood out as being particularly energy hungry. That is ourhosting supplier, Rackspace. Over the years the number of servers we have hosted with Rackspace has grown to the point that we cannot ignore the CO2 footprint those servers emit. We spoke with our business management consultant at Rackspace regarding our thoughts and explained what we are trying to achieve here at EvolvIT. We are glad to report Rackspace take this just as seriously, see this green link for more info!

The last major point that became obvious was our responsibility for our customers equipment power usage. We could simply set policies in place that would make every machine use less power - but we have to be mindful of our customers existing policies and how they use their systems, internally and remotely. It was decided that the best way forward was education, and so an email shot was sent to all our customers explaining simple - yet effective changes to usage and computer settings to make every machine use less power and thus have a smaller CO2 footprint.

See the points below for other areas we have changed,

• Bulbs replaced with energy efficient variations
• Scrap cardboard must be recycled, included customer boxes when asked to remove
• Paper to be shredded and recycled
• Company equipment to be configured for maximum power savings when not in use
• Replace battery wireless devices with re-chargeable alternatives
• Supply only top rated low power screens and devices