Earth Day for Web Workers

world.200401.3x540x270It’s Earth Day again, and as a result plenty of people are thinking about lowering their environmental impact. Web workers are no exception – and depending on just how you work on the web, you may already be helping out. But it seems there are always more steps you can take. Here’s our survey of some of the environmental implications of web work, as well as ways to chip in that may be less obvious.

The most obvious way for web workers to get involved in saving the planet is to just not drive to work. We recently covered one study that projects potential savings of 625 million barrels of oil per year in the US alone if everyone who could telework did telework. Another study, quoted in a report released today by the American Electronics Association, comes up with potential annual savings of 1.35 billion gallons of fuel with just an average of 1.6 days per week of teleworking. You can use the calculator over at the Telework Exchange to calculate your own potential (or actual) pollutant savings.But there’s more to cutting down your impact than just staying off the highways. Web workers by their nature tend to use more computing resources, and thus ultimately more power, than most people. Even moving your meetings to the virtual world has some impact, as witness the well-known (though debated) finding that a Second Life avatar uses as much energy as a Brazilian citizen. If you are in Second Life, by the way, you can now purchase carbon credits to offset this energy use.

Beyond turning the lights out, what’s a web worker to do? Fortunately, there are easy steps that can help:

And remember – although Earth Day only comes around once a year, energy and environmental concerns are with us all the time. Reading our sister site Earth2Tech will keep you updated on the latest high tech environmental innovations 365 days a year.

What are you doing for this Earth Day?

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