July 17, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- UK Web hosting provider Coreix (coreix.net) announced on Monday that it has made a 20-year commitment to the wildlife conservation charity World Land Trust (worldlandtrust.org) to become the UK's first carbon neutral data center.
Reports show that on average, a data center in the UK uses more power in a year than the city of Leicester, UK. Coreix says it knew it needed to do more than just talk about the environmental costs of its business, when it could not guarantee that all of its electricity was going to be provided by renewable sources, which is why it decided to partner with World Land Trust.
Each year the World Land Trust will plant a 1.2 hectare area in one of its two Ecuadorian projects for Coreix. Over a 20-year period this will sequester all of Coreix's annual carbon emissions, says the company.
"We are delighted to be a trail blazer with our green agenda," says Imran Boota, managing director of Coreix. "Planting in the equatorial region has been scientifically proven to be the most efficient way to reduce carbon dioxide. We want to be a leading example in our industry and we hope others will follow in our footsteps to make the UK's data center industry much more environmentally friendly."
The above press release makes a false and misleading claim that Coreix's facility is carbon neutral now, when it's clear that their partnership with the World Land Trust will not produce any real carbon offsets for years to come. Trees need time to grow, and the article clearly states that "Over a 20-year period this will sequester all of Coreix's annual carbon emissions". They cannot claim to be "100% CARBON NEUTRAL" now, when their tree planting partnership with the World Land Trust will take 20 years to "sequester all of Coreix's annual carbon emissions".
See this article for more information - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=621135 posted by: Aussie Bob | July 21, 2007 11:49PM
You have a point, Bob. But I think the issue here isn't necessarily that Coreix is out to mislead anybody. After all, it's the company that points out that it will take 20 years to balance out the emissions. The issue, I think, is that we probably need clear definitions for what a claim like "carbon neutral" actually means. It's certainly open for misinterpretation at the moment.
At the end of the day, though, Coreix is planting trees to offset the power it consumes. And that's probably a good step, regardless of how their PR or marketing folks decide to describe it.
I'm actually in a session at HostingCon right now, and we're talking about all these things. It's an issue that demands some collaborative work, for sure. posted by: Liam Eagle | July 23, 2007 03:53PM
