Like many companies, Google has made an effort to reduce its carbon footprint and to avoid negative impacts on the environment. The efforts of Google have made it one of the greenest companies around.
In 2007, Google reached its goal of becoming carbon neutral. To sustain this ongoing effort, they have installed enough solar panels to power approximately 1,000 average homes, which offsets 30 percent of peak electricity use for the facilities. Google shuttles are used by 1,470 employees. Google’s shuttles are fueled by B-20 biodiesel to get employees to work each day. These Bay Area shuttles take an estimated 660 cars off the road each year.
One Google search releases the equivalent of 0.2 grams of CO2. By comparison, it would take 5,000 Google searches to make a 2.5 mile car trip to the library. It would take 5,100 Google searches to do one load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher. It would take 1,050 Google searches to make a glass of orange juice. It would take 850 Google searches to make a daily newspaper. It would take 15,000 Google searches to make a cheeseburger.
Google-designed data centers use almost five times less energy than conventional facilities by using servers that run at 90 percent efficiency and cutting the energy used in cooling the servers by 80 percent. When a Google server is retired, every last part is either reused or recycled.