The Good and Bad of Rally’s 2009 Carbon Footprint


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Original Post by Ryan Martens

We compiled our carbon footprint data for 2009, and the CO2 per 100 paying users continues to decline.  In 2008, we emitted about 8.2 tons of CO2  per 100 users.  In 2009, that number dropped to about 7.8 tons of CO2 per 100 users. (We include building utilities, employee commuting, air travel, IT, hosted operations and SaaS vendors in our total carbon calculation)

2009 CHG Rally

Unfortunately, the total tons for our business and tons per employees continues to increase as we are growing in both employees, offices and people that travel on airplanes.  In 2009, we expanded the use of virtualization (VMWare), HD videoconferencing (Lifesize), desktop videoconferencing (both Google and Skype) and located more of our sales and field services employees into their territories.

As we look to 2010, we are beginning to work with our landlord to do longer term planning with regard to solar options for our Boulder facility.  We are also making major upgrades to our hosted operations and testing/staging platforms to support our growth and the growing mission critical nature of our application.  I expect our total CO2 to increase, our CO2 per employee to flatten and CO2 per 100 users to continue to decline as users, employees, airline miles and servers all go up in 2010.

Recycle

Some of the e-waste collected at our recycling fair

To end on bright note, we ran our electronic recycling fair again.  This year 8 pallets of CRT, TV, computers, servers and amplifiers left our offices and homes headed again for local recycling at Luminous Recycling in Denver.  Total weight of the 8 pallets was 3,984 pounds. This year we did it around St. Patrick’s day and held a Biggest-Loser-style competition in our game room with green beer on tap.  Though the race was tight between one of our engineers, an accountant and our CFO, I am proud to announce that engineering team of Mike and Susan won the competition this year with over 450 pounds of e-waste diverted to local recycling.

To read more about our carbon footprint, you can read my post and comments from 2009.

Ryan Martens is a 100# e-waste loser for 2009,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.


Ryan Martens original post

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