I had a meeting last week with our Health & Safety advisors in respect to Fluidata’s new environmental commitments and working towards our ISO 14001 standard. This accreditation is a relatively new one to come out of BSI and provides businesses with the guidelines necessary to measure their impact on the environment and measures to take to reduce pollution.
As a young company I felt it was better to go for such accreditations early on than wait until the inevitable legislation when it would be harder to implement. As it is, we seem to be doing a lot right in recycling over 50% of our daily office waste, minimising electricity usage and ensuring everyone uses public transport where possible when commuting. Further advances in high definition video conferencing and a new modern office will help us reduce this impact even further. Hopefully we will become a beacon of light for other businesses to follow and a demonstrator in how embracing the green revolution can deliver long-term cost savings.
Apparently in all the waste currently generated in the UK only 9% is recycled, the majority of which is met by households. Businesses currently have it far too easy and unless you are producing something like a washing machine or a car can remain under the radar of our EU mentalist masters. One of the big issues is actually in a services economy such as ours, where it is very easy to show no local issues but instead outsource all the pollution problems to a third party. In much the same way manufacturers can outsource to China and hence produce very little pollution in the UK; our industry relies on datacentres consuming vast quantities of fossil driven electricity away from our offices.
Over 1% of all global datacentre consumption comes from datacentres which just goes to show how power hungry the information age is. Our addition of a new datacentre last year in Hemel not only met all the economic needs in terms of scalability but also meant we could offer our clients even more efficient hosting. By building a new site from a blank sheet of paper savings could be made in the thermal efficiencies of the site to ensure a reduction in power consumption. And I am sure further advances will be made in the coming years as electricity becomes even more expensive and IT progressively more powerful.
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