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Based on the protocols, companies must decide how to account for both direct and
indirect emissions:
• Direct emissions These are from sources that your company owns or controls,
such as factory smokestacks, vents, and company vehicles. PART I
• Indirect emissions These are generated as a result of your company’s activities,
PART I
PART I
but occur in sources owned by someone else. For example, if you contract work out
or your employees travel, those emissions are generated by a third party, but
because of you.

Why Bother?
Why do you care about your carbon footprint? Although measuring your carbon footprint
is a good way to measure your overall progress toward becoming green, it isn’t just for
bragging rights or to keep in the corner of the company newsletter to let everyone know
how well you’re doing.
A good emissions inventory can help with numerous business goals, including the
following:
• Helping your company improve its efficiencies
• Reducing costs
• Getting public recognition for taking action to reduce or eliminate your climate
impacts

It can also help your organization if you are part of somebody else’s supply chain. Because
major organizations are requiring their suppliers to demonstrate their own commitment to
minimizing climate impacts, measuring your impacts may help you maintain your link in
the supply chain.
Consider, also, the impact on your customers. According to a study by GlobeScan
on behalf of AccountAbility and Consumers International, 63 percent of consumers
want climate change claims made by businesses to be proven by independent third
parties—GlobeScan, 2007.

Plan for the Future
When you measure your carbon footprint, you also need to keep an eye on your crystal
ball and think about the future. If your infrastructure is always expanding, even if you
virtualize, your virtualized solution will expand as well—just not as greedily as a
“conventional” system.
Try to anticipate your future needs when computing your carbon footprint, and take the
time now to think about how you can minimize that growth’s impact.

Cost Savings

Our primary intent in this book is to show you how adopting Green IT practices can save
your business potentially millions of dollars over current practices. Of course, we also want to
encourage you to adopt ecologically responsible practices, so that we don’t wind up living on