

Ask HN: Carbon neutrality for a startup? - lux

I've been seeing more and more companies becoming carbon neutral these days (Dreamhost is a popular example, and Rackspace offers a "green" server configuration as well as of this past January). After watching Al Gore's TED talk covering 15 ways of reducing your personal footprint, I started to look into companies selling carbon offsets.<p>My question for Hacker News is, how would you assess the footprint of a startup so as to be "green from the get-go"?  What I can think of is:<p>- Personal carbon use (house, transportation), since we don't have an office yet
- Servers (our host isn't green to my knowledge)
- Additional services such as Amazon S3 and EC2<p>How would you go about calculating a carbon footprint for such a scenario?  Also, do you think there is a real promotional advantage to being green?
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lux
Another question I didn't include in the original post but is also important:
Are the carbon certificate issuers worth trusting? I'd definitely want to do
some research on any company I potentially invested money into for something
like this.

I wonder if there's a site where you can rate or talk about these companies,
so the bad ones can be outed to the public... :)

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nose
Outing the bad companies: <http://badbuster.com/>

[http://badbuster.com/index.php?option=com_awaveshow&Item...](http://badbuster.com/index.php?option=com_awaveshow&Itemid=2&task=company&id=280)

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lux
Cool, thanks for the link!

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stcredzero
Carbon Neutrality is something systemic. Take any process that is locally
"carbon neutral" and you can trace back to some input or prerequisite that
involved an emission of carbon dioxide. Right at this moment it's hopeless.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. It's millions of small steps that
will eventually shift our economy and our society to sustainability. Just
don't expect to get there in a day.

(Poster drives a B100 Biodiesel fueled car, but realizes he's still part of
the carbon economy.)

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lux
Thanks for the comments :) I definitely see what you mean.

My partner and I were talking today about how if you really want to trace it
down to the nth degree, your ISP comes into play, all the way down to the
visitors' computers, etc. It's impossible to hit 100%, but definitely worth
trying for improvements :)

I don't have a car since I work from home, but on my personal consumption
there's also public transit to consider even still, and then water consumption
that had to be purified somehow, plastics in products we use, recycling,
energy and emissions in producing the meat on my plate, transportation of said
items, ad infinitum. I'm aiming at a reasonable guestimate for myself
personally for now anyway, definitely with the understanding that I have to
draw the line somewhere!

Hopefully we can do the same to a reasonable degree on the startup side, and
maybe if enough startups pave the way it could influence others to join in
too...

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alexwg
Right! CO2Stats Pro already incorporates client, network, and server
contributions.

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coglethorpe
Well, Fast Company magazine just had an article about American Apparel's
failed attempt at ethical marketing. That isn't quite the same as "green"
marketing, but I think it's parallel. They chose to market a sexy young image
with ethics as a subtitle:

<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/sex-vs-ethics.html>

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rms
There's a big difference between buying carbon credits and actually reducing
carbon emissions over time. You need to investigate your carbon credits to see
if they actually are reasonable. The best thing for offsetting carbon is
running an environmentally friendly tree farm. It's good to cut down the trees
because then they never catch on fire and release all of their carbon again.

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alexwg
A number of venture-backed startups I know use CO2Stats Pro. Take a look:

    
    
          http://www.co2stats.com

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lux
Thanks for the link. The info on the site wasn't quite clear on exactly how
calculations are made or how the process works. Can you explain a bit better
for us? For example, is the $9.95/month a flat-rate regardless of traffic or
do you give an assessment and determine the amount based on monthly traffic?
Also, is this just for the server or do you provide offsets for the rest of
the business as well? Thanks!

