Microsoft commits to carbon neutrality

Software giant Microsoft announced its commitment to become 100% carbon neutral for all of its operations worldwide (data centers, software development labs, offices, and employee air travel) in the upcoming fiscal year. Fantastic!

A couple of interesting aspects of this are:
First of all, they are using CarbonSystems, not any of the known other players like HARA or SAP.  This provides them with better real time view into their footprint and can drive immediate actions by the various business units.

Secondly, they implement a carbon fee chargeback model for all emissions which gets pooled in a central fund from which they buy Renewable Energy Credits. A good idea - they included the CFO as a prinary stakeholder. In this approach, every business units knows about its impact and is incentivised to take action to reduce exposure to the CFO.

For more details, here is their recently released white paper.

Unprintable File Format?

According to Popular Science, the World Wildlife Federation has developed a new file format, WWF, that is essentially identical to PDF except one thing: it can't be printed.

Right now the format only works for Macs and is essentially a plug-in that prevents printing of the format, but there are plans to expand to Windows soon.

Who knows if this will catch on in offices, but it certainly helps raise awareness of the tremendous cost and waste associated with paper printing.

Case Study on Workday's LEED-CI Gold certified office

Workday's property management group Hines did a case study on our LEED-CI Gold certified office build-out. Highlights are 93% ENERGY STAR compliance on equipment, $1.02 dollars saved on energy cost per square foot and 20% reduction in indoor water use. Well done!

See the full report here.

Biodegradables

In response to our last post on the plastic garbage patch, we decided to take action and switch over to biodegradable knives, forks and spoons. Currently we are consuming about 8000 pieces of throw-away cutlery per year. While biodegradables are about 40% more expensive, it does not total up to a huge amount overall.

Thanks to our finance department to making this green move!

Workday Office achieves LEED-CI Gold certification

Fantastic news from our property management company Hines. The Workday buildout of our office space has been submitted for LEED-CI (LEED for Commercial Interiors) certification and has achieved *GOLD* level! Workday will be receiving a plaque from USGBC in the next couple of weeks to commemorate this fantastic achievement.

Also, Workday has been granted the "Green Office" certificate by Hines for scoring high at their green questionnaire, another accolade for our office setup.

Congratulations for Lisa Kindred and Betty Landes for making all this happen!

Workday wins Green Building of America Award

Fantastic news! From more than 2,500 nominated projects, Workday, Inc. @ Pleasanton Corporate Commons project (submitted by Hines) has been selected as a Green Building of America Award-winning project and will be featured in the upcoming special Real Estate & Construction Review-Northwest Green Success Stories edition. Each Green Building of America Success Story project is highlighted in a case study that intertwines the words of the project’s owner/developer, consultants, architects and contractors to explain how the teams worked together to design and build one of the region’s most important, innovative or unique new or renovated sustainable facilities.

Kudos to our Lisa Kindred and Hines' Anne Sparks for our award-winning green office setup!

I will provide a link to the online version of the article once it becomes available.