environment

I got a bizarre call from Lucinda on Friday who announced she was from <unintelligible PR company>. She informed me that I was the head of marketing for my company and it quickly became clear she didn’t know what company I worked for. When I asked she said “errrr, is it a software company”. Anyway, she wanted me to comment on sustainability for <unintelligible magazine for public sector> about our/my position on sustainability. She informed me it’s a very important topic for a big company like ours and she really thought I ought to comment. I politely declined saying I think she ought to try our press office and her to our website – which she duly noted the address of. “microsoft.com was it?”….sigh

Anyway, I decided to do some research myself just in case Lucinda called back and found the Microsoft Environment site quite educational. It’s not a topic I know a great deal about so maybe that’s why but if you’re interested in learning more it’s a good place to start. This was quite startling

 

….the environmental impact of moving all those bits and bytes around is substantial. Last year, emailing and web surfing in the U.S. consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours, or 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity. Indeed, with a billion people now online and the number growing daily, the world’s computer networks consume more than 100 billion kilowatts of electricity annually, with businesses paying an estimated $7.2 billion in utility bills associated with their use of IT networks. As electricity costs increase, the percentage of IT budgets dedicated to energy consumption could soon exceed 50%.

and then

 

…the annual carbon footprint of 15 PCs can equal that of a mid-size car, and about two-thirds of the electricity drawn by a PC is wasted by running the computer at full power when it isn’t being used

 

Holy crap. It got me thinking and I’m off to learn more about this based on these two set of stats alone.

 

As a slight aside, I like the way increasingly more Microsoft sites are including social networking links – this site helps you share information using Facebook, Digg, delicious and other services.