Many companies and industries have taken up the cause of sustainability and are helping to lead us into our next phase of evolution. Out front is the building/construction/design industry, behind the work of the UG Green Building Council and the LEED standard, successful, pioneering companies such as Patagonia and REI, as well as Clean Tech, alternative power and alternative fuels.
Far behind in the debate is the telecommunications industry, at least in the U.S. – its leaders barely showing up on the radar if at all. While the EPA’s recent report indicting data centers as one of the most concentrated hogs of energy, this only begins to scratch the surface of devices, wires, and switching centers that all add up to a much higher and more concentrated figure than the EPA estimate for just co location /data center facilities.
At the intersection of new technologies and our desire to codify methods, techniques and corporate practices that can start to make a dent in this huge footprint is where BetterWorld Telecom has partnered with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute to focus our efforts. We will be devoting many of our donation dollars, time and energy in the coming months and years towards developing a green standard in the telecom carrier marketplace, where none currently exists. Reports from Insight Research and McKinsey just in the last few months support and advocate telecommunications services as a “right here, right now”, major opportunity as a serious carbon abatement strategy for organizations nationwide and worldwide.
Specifically, we will capitalize on sociological trends such as remote workers, virtual offices, decentralization, and democratization of the work place, alongside newer technologies such as virtual PBX, unified communications, integrated voice and data networks, integrated video/voice/web conferencing to create best practices and a new category that professionals can now include in the list of possibilities for making their company or project more green.
This project is a key element in documenting and researching this area of sustainability. We hope to document best practices in capturing baseline data of an organization’s telecom environmental footprint including firm recommendations on sociological solutions that can actually save money, reduce footprint and create a more flexible and functional communications solution at the same time.
We will make this first phase publicly available to companies nationwide and around the world and it is our hope that it will actually serve as a catalyst to help start pulling our industry towards a more sustainable stance. In addition, we will be working with our partners to create the first telecom offset that those not able to change out their practices can at least offset their usage and the downstream power that is used to support phone and Internet services.
Let us know if you want more information on the project, but we will try to keep most of it published along the way on our new partner site at www.justmeans.com , keyword: BetterWorld.
Matt, Jay and the BGI Team
Posted in: Partners
