Carbon footprint is a relatively modern term, every person or business creates their own carbon footprint. The term is used to describe the amount of carbon dioxide an individual or business creates due to the consumption of fossil fuels, the term and philosophy of carbon off-setting has become widely discussed due to the green house effect and the emmission of green house gasses.
We all create a carbon footprint no matter how we live our lives or where we live, green house gasses can be created through the production and consumption of food, fuel, goods and the disposal of stuff we no longer need such as technology equipment.
How Technology Can Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emmissions
Technology enables business and individual users to reduce their carbon footprint in a number of ways. Cloud hosted video conferencing services are one such technology that ensures we can communicate with our business associates, friends and family all over the world. International meetings and conferencing events can be set-up quickly and multiple delegates from all over the world can attend them, thanks to technology events that once required air travel and took weeks or even months to set-up can be arranged in hours. Video conferencing makes hotels and air travel a thing of the past for some business users, technology can be used to reduce the downtime and expenditure associated with international travel.
The McKinsey Report
The McKinsey Report suggested that technology could help to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by the year 2020, equivalent to 15% of global emissions. The report suggests that despite increased use of technology in growing economies such as China, India and Brazil virtualizationcan be used to reduce the size and number of data centers required.
Virtualization is the consolidation of a large number of individual machines onto one large server such as a Cisco blade server. Cisco says their technology, simplifies physical and virtual networks, offers increased flexibility, scales better and more rapidly. Cisco say their solutions enable companies to; reduce costs, increase manageability, lower infrastructure and increase flexibility.
The McKinsey Report says, “Virtualization improves the productivity and overall ROI of the IT infrastructure with the use of SANs (Storage Area Networks) and other NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices which reduce redundancy and idle time for the scarce, energy guzzling resources. Virtualization improves the server utilization rates resulting in lesser no. of data centers required. The technology enables lesser energy consumption, lesser green house-gas emission, reduced heat generation, and lesser production of e-wastes.”
Recycle
When we throw our old equipment away it may go to landfill where it requires fuel to move it around and eventaully bury it, recycling old equipment means we can prevent it filling up landfill sites. You may even be able to make some money back and earn carbon off-set credits.
If you have upgraded your blade servers or invested in virtualization you may wish to consider recycling your old equipment, recycling is another way to reduce your carbon footprint and clawback some of the expenditure you invest in new infrastructure. You can recycle your old infrastructure by selling it to an asset recovery firm who will refurbish and sell it on.
This post was supplied and written on behalf of Lobster Net, asset disposal, discount Cisco and Huaweii.
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