Luis Suarez reminded me that today is Blog Action Day for the environment. This follows an informal challenge sent out to Luis by James Governor who, apart from being a co-founder at Redmonk, also runs Greenmonk. Luis says:
They say that the biggest impact of KM (knowledge management) and Social Computing is when applied locally and I truly believe that (And for a number of years now). Thus with the excuse of today’s blog post I am actually going to take some action of my own, and continue to blog every now and then on how the little town I live in makes some more substantial progress into encouraging us all recycle more properly by providing us the means of doing so. Because, otherwise what is the point of everyone else recycling except us?
Luis asked me what Jude and I do. Jude has been an environmentalist for more than 30 years so I get a lot of instruction on what to do with my waste 
We’ve recycled for more than 10 years. In France, they encouraged us by offering free compost in exchange for recycling as much of our waste as possible. In Spain, we have separate bins for different types of waste such as bottles, plastics, metals and household waste.
Professionals have a long history of attempting to reach the Nirvana of the paperless office. VersionOne recently won a gong for its paperless office product. I hope this might inspire firms to consider how new technologies might help in the fight to reduce our carbon footprint. It doesn’t stop there. If you use data centres or data services (don’t we all?) then it’s worth asking just how green the supplier really is. You may not know it but the drift towards Internet computing is ramping power costs at an alarming rate.
I’m ashamed to say that the number of flights I’ve taken recently means I’ve been a net producer of carbon emission. However, airlines like Easyjet allow me to assuage my conscience by providing a calculation of how much I’m contributing to pollution and then making a payment in compensation.
Technorati Tags: environment, green issues
