wikiHow:Carbon Neutral
wikiHow is a carbon neutral website. Becoming carbon neutral means that we have obtained a carbon offset to balance out any greenhouse gas emissions we create by running our website and back office operations. Learn more about carbon offsets and how they work at the wikiHow page on How to Buy a Carbon Offset or the Wikipedia page.
We worked with TerraPass on doing a carbon audit. They helped us measure exactly how much carbon we were putting into the atmosphere by running wikiHow:
- Computers/Servers: 45,472 lbs (20,625 kg) of carbon - 11 dual 64 bit AMD Opteron production servers, 2 smaller development servers, and a few other computers in various locations.
- Air travel: 11,500 lbs (5216 kg) - 30,000 miles (48,280 km) of air travel.
- Office: 2,678 lbs (1214 kg) - The electricity and heating use for our small office in Menlo Park, CA.
- Car: 4,253 lbs (1929 kg). 5,000 miles (8046 km) of driving.
- Train travel: 2,865 lbs (1299 kg) - Chris daily commuting via train from San Francisco to Menlo Park, CA.
- Jack riding bike to work: 0 lbs of carbon!
- Total Carbon Footprint : 66,768 lbs (29.8 metric tons) of carbon per year.
Armed with that knowledge, TerraPass has taken actions to offset our carbon footprint by doing a combination of funding green energy, cow power (methane digesters) and landfill gas flaring projects. At the end of the day our 66,768 pounds of carbon emissions will be balanced out by a comparable amount of carbon reductions.
In addition, we have taken a few actions to further reduce wikiHow's total carbon footprint. In late 2006 we switched to the energy AMD servers:
http://www.wikihow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1545
And in March 2007, Jack started bicycle commuting to work instead of driving.
We hope that in time many more websites will also become carbon neutral. After going carbon neutral, spread the word by adding one of these icons to your website or blog.
