Facebook launches green page
Facebook this week launched a green page, which has “lots of information about what the company is doing in the environment/energy space.”
The site is features lots of information on being ‘green’, as well as outlines Facebook’s green vision, as follows:
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.Mission:One of our core values at Facebook is the responsibility to do everything we can to reduce our environmental impact on the planet. We are proud that Facebook plays a unique part in promoting efforts to achieve a clean energy future. By enabling millions of people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share, we believe we can help unleash innovative environmental initiatives across the globe.
At the same time, we are taking proactive steps as a company to implement responsible sustainability practices throughout Facebook. This includes our own efforts toward energy efficient computing, smart practices by our employees and our facilities, sensible advocacy and partnerships and leveraging the social sustainability of our platform.
In one recent example, programming language designed by our engineers (HipHop for PHP) enabled Facebook to reduce the CPU usage on our web servers by roughly 50 percent. Less CPU usage means fewer servers, resulting in less overall energy usage. That is a good thing for Facebook but also useful for many other companies with intense data needs. To spread the benefit, we released the software as open source across the web and shared the story of its success with our peers. Today, Drupal.org, Wikipedia and others are testing their own versions of HipHop and we hope many more will use it.
As our business continues to grow, we are committed to doing all we can through our people and innovation to help deliver a clean energy future. When it comes to the environment, we are always looking to do more.
We only have one planet. Let’s do all we can protect it.
The site also lists what Facebook is actually doing to be more green in the “programs” tab. In a nutshell, the company is active in recycling and composting of packing, packaging and other waste materials, the net benefits of which eliminates 294 tons of CO2 (presumably per year as the site doesn’t say), equaling to the emissions of 59 mid-sized cars.
The company has also reduced its water consumption by nearly 60% through conservation efforts, equal to more than 28 Olympic-sized swimming pools annually. The company also has a green transportation program offering shuttles, car and van pooling, bike racks and subsidized public transportation for employees.
At the same time, Facebook has invested in motion sensor controlled lighting (reduces energy consumption by 60%) and compact fluorescent and photo cell exterior light (reduces energy consumption by 70% compared to standard lighting) for its offices and facilities.
Perhaps more interesting is what the company has contributed in terms of energy efficient computing. In addition to the HipHop for PHP programming language (as mentioned earlier), Facebook has also developed Haystack, which “has helped Facebook use almost 20% less power than industry standard storage architecture.”
Meanwhile, Facebook’s public relationships company told me in an email that the company yesterday – and over the past week – have joined Alliance to Save Energy and the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign (DESC) to partner to promote environmental responsibility through this new page.
“Facebook’s membership in DESC and the Alliance to Save Energy is part their ongoing program to develop energy efficient computing systems while also enabling public activism,” the company said.
Category: Green corporations, Green ICT, Recycling
