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: 20,669 lbs (9375,3 kg) of carbon - 5 dual 64 bit AMD Opteron production servers, 2 smaller development servers, and a few other computers in various locations.
- Air travel: 20,269 lbs (9193,8 kg) - Multiple flights to Taiwan and Montreal to attend upcoming wiki conferences.
- Office: 2,678 lbs (1214,7 kg) - The electricity and heating use from our (former) office in San Francisco.
- Train travel: 2,865 lbs (1299,5 kg) - Commuting via train from Palo Alto, California to the old San Francisco office.
- Total Carbon Footprint : 46,481 lbs of carbon per year (21 metric tons of CO2 equivalent)
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 46,481 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
supposedly lower energy AMD servers:
http://www.wikihow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1545
And in March 2007 we gave up the San Francisco office to move
within bicycling distance from home:
http://www.wikihow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3667
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.
