Making the most out of Earth Day, the green tech way
As you can imagine, my colleagues and I have been deluged with special promos and greenwash marketing campaigns related to the Earth Day event on April 22. I've combed through the e-mails and wanted to mention the following campaigns and programs that might interest you as a green IT buyer. Some are fun and some are very practical. Some are both. One final thought, I got NOWHERE near the amount of communication related to Earth Day last year. That, in itself, says a lot about how far corporate America has come in the past 12 months. Still, Yahoo! in a recent of 2,220 U.S. adults that more than half didn't know what Earth Day was. So, I guess there's still a need for folks like me and Harry to trumpet the green tech cause.
Here goes:
- Buy one, get one recycled: Hewlett-Packard is offering to pick up and recycle for free one server (no matter the logo on it) for the first 1,000 companies/customers that buy one of its new BladeSystem servers. The latest editions were announced last month and include the HP ProLiant BL260c , which HP claims uses 64 percent less power than other comparable systems.
- Don't be lost in translation: Two organizations, the bigwordGroup and Zerofootprint, have teamed up to offer what they're calling the 1-Minute Calculator, which calculates an organization's carbon footprint. What makes this one different is that it's available in 16 languages and can provide measurements optimized for more than 20 countries -- from China and Egypt to Argentina and the Russian Federation.
- One person's junk ... Yahoo! has coordinated a big push with Freecycle in order to encourage the reuse of all sorts of existing resources. (Incidentally, I've written about Freecycle before. I love their model, which plays into the garage sale mentality of one person's junk is another person's treasure.)
- Get out your digital cameras. Quick! Green Plug, which has created an innovative technology for consolidating the number of power supplies that you need for all of your various electronic gadgets, is holding a "What's Under Your Desk" photo sweepstakes. Sounds vaguely obscene, doesn't it? I would be TOTALLy embarrassed to reveal the spaghetti mess under mine. Anyway, the idea is to get people aware of the problem. First prize is lunch in Beverly Hills with "green advocates" Christopher Knight (yes, Peter Brady!) and his wife Adrianne Curry. Second place is a $500 gift certificate to Wal-Mart, and Green Plug will make a donation to the person's preferred green non-profit cause.
- Green browsing: Flock is creating an Eco-Edition of its browser, which will aggregate environmental and eco-friendly content from companies including the Discovery Networks, The New York Times, Yahoo!, TreeHugger, Grist, Ecorazzi and AllTop. You can download the software starting on Earth Day.