RallyDev.com
Tue 6 Apr 2010
The Good and Bad of Rally’s 2009 Carbon Footprint
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)
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.
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.
That is awesome guys! Even though there was still growth within the company, at least you are aware of it and are working on ways to mitigate it. It is really inspiring to see a Tech company making it a priority to help reduce their carbon footprint. Heading in the direction of solar power seems like a smart move. Do you track daily commuting cost per employee beyond just air flight travel? Keep up the good work!
Great news, Ryan. This is fantastic.
Scott and Mike,
Thanks for the positive feedback.
Yes, we track employee commuting to work on a rough average per quarter. We also collect volunteer hours from employees on per quarter basis. We built something in Salesforce to handle the tracking and boil into a GHG tracking spreadsheet. That seems to be the right cadence and level of detail for us. Given our breakdown of GHG and our size, we just need to be in the right ballpark. Make sense?
Ryan