Google Green Blog: September 2015

Cutting the crap: 8 things you may not know that Google is doing to reduce waste

9/29/15

Humankind is using up natural resources at an astonishing rate. Each year, our economy consumes far more than what the planet can naturally provide. Recent data shows that in 2015, society’s demand for resources will be equivalent to 1.5 Earths -- clearly not a sustainable path.

Our everyday actions can help shrink this oversize footprint -- through things like traveling more efficiently or using cleaner energy -- and we’ve built many tools to help make it easier. But companies should lead by example. That belief has propelled us to become the world’s biggest corporate purchaser of renewable power, a fully carbon-neutral company, and more.

But we won’t stop there. Today we’re excited to launch a new partnership, with the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a regenerative “circular economy” -- an economy that eradicates waste through smart design.

In a traditional “linear” economy, waste is rampant: finite natural resources are taken from the Earth, made into products, and ultimately disposed. A circular economy creates a more lasting, closed-loop system: it reduces the use of finite resources, and focuses on ways to continuously cycle materials back into the economy -- like renewable energy resources and highly reusable materials. As the Foundation explains in the video below, the circular approach can offer big advantages for both the planet and the financial bottom line.Fortunately, we’re not starting at square one. Our current waste reduction efforts span many areas of our business -- and demonstrate at what circular economy principles can look like in practice. Here are several ways Google has already begun to “cut the crap”:
Cutting energy waste

Over the last five years, we’ve improved our data center operations and hardware to get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of electricity.

Turning waste into energy! At our main campus, we pipe in landfill gas from a local landfill to supply a portion of our electric and heating needs.

Cutting materials waste

Since 2007, we've repurposed enough outdated servers to avoid buying over 300,000 new replacement machines.

As we’ve designed and constructed new buildings in the last year, our recycling of demolition waste and onsite materials kept more than 10,000 tons of material out of landfills.

Cutting food waste

In addition to our large-scale composting program, we use a software system in our kitchens to track pre-consumer food waste (expired items, trimmings, etc.). At our Bay Area campuses alone, this system has prevented more than 170,000 pounds of food going into the waste stream over the past year.

A growing number of our kitchens serve baked goods and other foods made with Coffee Flour, a flour derived from traditionally discarded parts of a coffee plant.

Cutting water waste

At our Atlanta data center, our reuse water system enables us to use recycled wastewater from a local sewage treatment plant for our cooling needs.

At our main campus, we invest in drought-resistant landscaping and irrigate with recycled water whenever possible. We’re on track for a 30 percent reduction in campus water use by the end of this year compared to 2013.

Our partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation will help us take our waste reduction and sustainability programs to the next level. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with the Foundation to explore and shape a series of initiatives to embed circular economic principles into the fabric of Google’s infrastructure, operations, and culture. Circle back with us in the coming year to hear more about where these projects take us and how they’ll support our ongoing commitment to the planet.
Posted by Jim Miller, VP of Worldwide Operations

Making the invisible visible by mapping air quality

9/28/15

How clean is the air we breathe? How much climate-warming greenhouse gases are our cities emitting? These are difficult questions to answer because most air pollution is measured at a city level, not at the neighborhood or community level which is more relevant to people's daily lives. With street-level air pollution data, a parent of an asthmatic child could reduce exposure to air pollution that causes asthma attacks when they go to the park to play. Bike commuters and outdoor enthusiasts could find the healthiest route for their trips. Or a city planner could pinpoint areas of low air quality in her city and devise specific solutions to improve it. Seeing where and when the air quality is good or bad could help identify how to reduce pollution most effectively—like changing traffic light patterns to reduce idling traffic or keeping heavy trucks out of neighborhoods that are most vulnerable.

Today at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, we’re announcing with Aclima that we will measure air pollution in more communities and map air quality at the street level. This follows our 2014 project with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to map methane leaking from natural gas local distribution systems, and our project to map multiple air pollutants in Denver with Aclima, which we announced in July.
Now, we’re equipping Google Street View cars with Aclima’s air pollution sensing platform to measure and map air quality in at least three major metropolitan areas in California, including communities in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Central Valley regions. With 38 million residents and nearly 30 million registered vehicles, managing California’s air quality is among the most challenging problems in the United States.

Street View car equipped with Aclima’s air pollution sensing platform
At high concentrations, particulate matter, black carbon, ozone, and other pollutants can trigger asthma attacks and make COPD worse. Worldwide, these pollutants lead to millions of premature deaths every year. These are the pollutants our cars will be measuring. Scientists working with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and other partners are already helping us determine how the equipped vehicles should drive in order to collect data more efficiently. We’ll make the data collected during our drives available on Google Earth Engine to scientists and air quality experts, including the EDF and others, who will help analyze and model the data with the goal of linking human health impacts to air pollution and exploring other applications at a community level.

In the long run, our vision is to enable individuals, communities and policy-makers to make smart decisions to improve their health and our environment. By putting street-level air quality information overlaid on Google Earth and Google Maps, we’re making it more useful and actionable. And this, we hope, will lead to cleaner air.Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach