We Won a Green Award
OpenConcept is a member of Ottawa’s Carbon 613 community. This includes businesses and other organizations in the Ottawa area that are committed to setting CO2 targets and reducing their climate change footprint. Carbon 613 is one of 7 Green Economy Hubs that are organized by Green Economy Canada.
We won the Rocket Launch Award this year for some work that we did to reduce our own footprint. It a real honor to share the stage with Ottawa’s Ikea as well as Angela’s B&B. Angela Keller-Herzog has stepped up to run for the Green Party in Ottawa Centre, which is amazing! We need more people in power who understand the need for a green economy.
I was also really fortunate to have time present after the awards about the sustainability of my industry. Sadly, it’s got problems. I could go into more depth about this, but much of this would be rehashing what I’ve talked about before. I believe we need to work together to address this, leveraging the strengths of open source.
Blogging about this issue hasn’t done as much as speaking about the topic. For folks who are interested my slides are posted here.
The basics of it though is that we need to think about what is powering our data. We’d like it to be clean & green, but often it’s coal. If you want to check if your website is running on a server powered by renewable energy, the Green Web Foundation can help. There is no reason why everyone couldn’t be doing this.
We also rarely question what we are shipping & storing on the web. The Website Carbon site allows anyone to evaluate how much energy (expressed in terms of CO2) is used in loading a web page. There are lots of tools to optimize websites. Google loves it so much they have released several tools to make this easier. That said, it is rarely something that clients ask for.
I ended the talk with a summary of the Sustainable Web Manifesto. If the internet was a country it would be the 6th largest polluter in the world.This is based on taking the total ICT emissions from How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity compared with Carbon emission by country.
We need to have more people aware about what they are doing that has a climate impact. We need more organizations eager to support businesses that have invested in green infrastructure. We also need to find ways that we can all do our part to reduce the CO2 impact of sector.
