Xerox has long been known for innovation and recently they released a Sustainability Calculator which helps companies realise the savings they will achieve by reductions in the number of printers they have.
The calculator is an online Flash application into which companies can enter information about the printers they have and see the savings they will achieve by reducing their number.
In the example below I entered different numbers of non energy star enabled mono and colour printers. I then entered the same number of printers and copies into the optimised scenario section but this time marking the printers as energy star enabled to see the difference an energy star rating would have on the results.
You can get results for Energy, Solid Waste or Greenhouse Gas. The results below are for Greenhouse Gas and predictably the only difference between the two columns is in Operating Energy Greenhouse Gas emissions.
As printers are typically used only between 1 and 2 percent of the time, there is plenty of room for reducing their number in an organisation and still facilitating printing when required.
It may sound counterintuitive that Xerox are enabling companies to see the benefits of fewer printers but since Anne Mulcahy has taken over as CEO of Xerox, it has been heading towards 50% revenues from services and consulting business around document management. Telling companies how to save money and be more green is a growing business.
I am extremely pleased to announce that Tom Raftery, social craftsman and energy maven, has agreed to become a Greenmonk associate. He will now be a regular contributor to the Greenmonk blog, and we will also work together to build out a related consulting-oriented business. Its very early days for Greenmonk itself, let alone the Raftery relationship, but I am hopeful that I can help Tom establish the regular monthly income that will enable him to live in Seville in style. We plan to work together for a lower footprint.
Seriously though: Tom’s skill-set is right on the money. Greenmonk was always supposed to be about grassroots, open and social software approaches and methods, and Tom is an expert. I would be surprised if we don’t get some greenmonk podcasting going at some point. And Tom has real experience of building a hyper energy efficient data center. what’s not to like?
photo of the Alcazar Palace in Seville courtesy of John Picken under CreativeCommons Atrribution 2.0 license.
One of the cool things about the twitter messaging platform is that the application programming interface (API) is really easy to use. The truly outstanding thing about twitter though is the amazing range of communities and cool people it has fostered. Greenmonk has a core belief that web technology is allowing a hitherto unprecedented lowering of barriers. We can all participate.
A good example popped up this week. Dan Light is a fellow East Londoner I had never heard of before a couple of weeks ago, when Hugh Macleod twittered about some great blog everyone should read. The blog, a review of a SXSWi, a hipster conference for people with Ruby skills and lazer-etched Apple laptops, is indeed excellent, a deeply personal manifesto for change.
But that’s just the back story. What’s the water kula thing about? Well- it seems that Dan had an idea last Friday. By Monday the WaterKula application was up and running. Its basically a social platform built on twitter that notifies you about cool stuff (a great great grandchild of boingboing). We had a similar experience building a social application over a weekend when we introduced the chinposin avatar capture service. I don’t buy the need to be reminded to drink more liquids, and like any cool new web service the revenue model is murky. But then the goal is clean fresh water for people that really need it.
Our goal is to use WaterKula to raise money for WaterAid, possibly through some form of sponsorship. This will only become possible if we can attract enough followers, so please tweet the word far and wide, and help us make water cooler.
Dan should really hook up with the people at Akvo, an ambitious clean water initiative, which regular readers will know recently achieved second round funding, and might be interested in a potentially revenue-raising game. It has never been easier to be a social entrepreneur. If you want to make a difference you can. Dan does. Mark does. The barriers to entry are dropping. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make a difference. Why not try and make water cleaner by hanging out at the virtual water cooler?
And for my next trick, April 28th I will be mostly be fostering conversations about more efficient energy utilisation at EnergyCamp, an unconference that is set to piggyback on Interop. I am really excited about the event but its a big responsibility - I am going to be the main compere/host. If you’re going to be at Interop in Las Vegas (grrrrr….) in April please consider joining us.
Whether you’re an end user of technology, an IT professional, a vendor of hardware, software or infrastructure solutions, or an industry observer with an interest in technology’s energy consumption, Energy Camp is for you. Energy Camp is a collaborative forum where industry stakeholders will gather together to discuss the growing impact of today’s energy costs on IT’s bottom line, and the overarching importance of energy conservation and utilizing greener IT solutions and methods.
I came across an ad today that seemed so outrageous, so very very very wrong, that I just had to click on it. Green memory? Never heard of it, I thought. Pure spin. But when I followed the link to Crucial Memory I had to smile. You see the argument is really simple - don’t buy a new PC, but buy more memory for your existing machine instead.
And, you’ll help eliminate the need to dispose of your old system — something that’s great for the environment. Approximately 70% of heavy metals (including lead and mercury), in landfill sites come from e-waste. That’s reason enough to hold on to your system.
Well said. It would be hypocritical, and overly curmudgeonly, not to applaud the spin, given the fact Greenmonk has written about why you shouldn’t always upgrade just for the flash new thing, the latest Apple or whatever.
There is also a deeper truth at work here. Memory invariably is the bottleneck on a Windows PC. Very often the best way to improve the performance of Windows XP is more RAM. If you buy a new machine however, Vista will likely run just like your old machine did (with a slicker interface its true). New PC- same speed, old PC-upgraded more speed. So for speed and sustainability go buy some RAM. Its like darning socks. Crucial may be greenwashing, but its greenwashing containing an important truth.
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