Annually, Serversaurus commits to giving a certified non-profit organisations, 1% of our turnover as part of our sustainability commitments. In the past we’ve supported organisation such as Take 3 for the sea, Friends of the Earth and others, to assist in beach clean-ups and anti-fracking initiatives.

As a means to spread what we can across very different organisations, this year we chosen The Crossing Land, an organisation dedicated to developing youth leadership in sustainable design.

The Crossing is a sustainably designed permaculture camp located near Bermagui, Australia, providing a unique space for student’s to experience sustainable design, habitat survey and landcare.

Learn more:

During B Corp month, the B Corporation community pulled together to promote the B Corp movement and share our business practices which represent our environmental and social initiatives.

We believe being a B Corporation impacts not only the environment but also has a positive influence our employees and client base.

We’ve put together this short clip to visit some of the questions which have been circulating during B Corp month and to talk about our company efforts which are core to our philosophy.

New to B Corp? take a read about the movement on the B Corporation website.

The organizers of B Corp month have also curated some great footage of various B Corporations speaking about their outlooks and practices, check it out at the B Corp month website!

Diana Barnett, founder of The Toxic Fox Radio speaks with Martin Gleeson, Co-founder of The Electron Workshop and Serversaurus to discuss a range of topics that include and elaborate on how & why practising Equality, Autonomy and Justice in the workspace is key, the journey of becoming B-Corp accredited, the influential factors behind Martins ethos and increasing business productivity= Quality vs Quantity.

Martin Gleeson | equality | social justice & a 4 day week | TFS011 – The Toxic Fox

To listen to the interview, read the article or to find more about The Toxic Fox Show, follow the link above ‘Read the article on thetoxicfox.com’.

The Serversaurs would like to acknowledge our gratitude to Diana Barnett for being an amazing host and facilitator, to the rest of the Toxic Fox crew for helping make this happen and to Martin Gleeson for welcoming and embracing the opportunity to share with us his thoughts, practises & insights.

Interview Quote from Martin Gleeson:
“Don’t be afraid. Be prepared to be yourself and to put your values and your ethics way upfront. Sometimes people may be fearful about how they may be perceived by other businesses, and I just say forget particularly about the thoughts of businesses that you don’t like. It’s often funny that we worry more about the opinions of people that we don’t respect than those that we do.
So if you are worried that another business will think that you arent serious enough because you are supporting environmental issues and so forth then you really shouldn’t be worried about what they think because they’re not on your same wave length re: values.”

Although the first deployment will span 2 years before returning to the Tsushima coast, It is estimated that after 10 years of operation this device will have cleaned half of the waste which lies in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Not only is this the first ever passive ocean cleaning device but also the largest ever floating device to date.

Complementing this project the organization is also working with Tsushima Island to investigate whether the collected waste could be used as an alternative energy source.

Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup: “Taking care of the world’s ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today. Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time.

To read more about this project check out their website “The Ocean Cleanup”.

Introduction

Becoming a certified B Corporation is a symbol of a business’s ethical and sustainable policies and practices. It is becoming an increasingly desirable certification to hold, as B Corp recognition is an important statement of a business’s (re)definition of success – a definition which puts the environment and people before profits, while still performing its economic role as a for-profit business: B Corps are not non-profits!

Whilst the process is a relatively simple 3-step process outlined on the B Corporation website, it can be time-consuming. Sometimes awkward technicalities and the formalisation/codification of sustainablility policies and procedures can stall progress, especially for smaller businesses with limited resources. This series of posts describes our steps and thoughts in becoming a certified B Corporation. We hope that together, these posts can act as a guide to smaller enterprises embarking on their own B Corp Journey, ultimately promoting positive business practices both here in Australia and globally.

What is a B Corporation?

Put simply, certified B Corps are a grassroots movement of businesses who choose to broaden the definition of business success to include environmental and social responsibility alongside profit-making. In this way, they use the power of business for the greater good.

Why did Serversaurus decide to become a B Corp?

• The values upheld by B Corps are truly reflected in both our mission and history, which upholds environmental stewardship and social responsibility as being an integral part in everything we do. This value alignment meant that pursuing B Corporation certification was a natural step for Serversaurus.
• It’s also important to substantiate Serversaurus’ sustainability efforts and to make our business stand out from the crowd.
• Certification would also mean joining a great network of B Corps, in Australia and globally, with which bigger and better sustainable business ideas could circulate and materialise.
• Finally, the formalisation and documentation of sustainability practices required to pass the assessment would also act as a lasting record of sustainability achievements and benchmarking tool to set & maintain targets.

Our journey begins in the next post!

To say that climate change is human induced is to overblow and overstate our role in the scheme of the universe quite completely over a long period of time.

Which is interesting, because on his Wikipedia page there don’t seem to be any science or climate qualifications…

The crux of the inquiry is to potentially take away the DGR (deductible gift recipients) status of 100-150 environmental groups (currently 600 organisations have DGR status), on the basis that they are taking part in campaigning activities.

Campaigning versus action

The argument the coalition is putting forward, is that DGR status should only be awarded to organisations taking part in active work – for example, tree planting, rubbish removal, tackling soil salinity issues, etc, and not in any campaigning activities.

What is campaigning? Campaigning could include raising awareness for large environmental catastrophes where there is no active way to actually participate in pure action – for example, current organisations at risk use some of their funds to raise awareness and campaign for the Great Barrier Reef, The Kimberly, The Franklin, Kakadu and other special places, which are either already actively being destroyed or are slated for environmental tampering.

In a nutshell, this inquiry is an attempt to silence groups who use their funds to bring about awareness of environmental issues. This is potentially a huge blow to many organisations who work tirelessly to protect our planet with very limited resources.

Meanwhile, the government has just spent $100,000 on travel costs to send environment department officials to campaign and lobby countries not to have UNESCO list The Great Barrier Reef as being in danger.

You can help

Lodge your submission with this form by May 21st, 2015 – note: Do not use the text in this form – write your own or heavily modify the existing copy. If you simply add your name and press send, your submission will go into a ‘proforma’ pile, and be less effective.

Read more from Friends of the Earth, the ABC and The Conversation.

Disclaimer: We actively donate to environmental organisations through our 1% for the Planet giving.

However I digress, there are enough blog posts on productivity to sink the largest of ships, and what I really wanted to talk about was my discovery of environmental accounting…

The [true] cost of business to the earth

CFO’s around the world work day and night to maintain the machinations of building widgets for one dollar, and selling them for (at the very least), two dollars. Every avenue is explored to reduce the build cost and increase the sell price. Yet one cost which is rarely evaluated, is the true environmental burden of production and whether from a macro scale, whether the widget is worth producing at all.

The piece of Fuller’s book which has stuck in my head after all these years, was his citing of Francois de Chardenedes’ questioning of the environmental cost of workers commuting every day to work caged in fossil fuel burning cars:

… with all the cosmic energy processing (as rain, wind and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and I pay for household electricity), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum.

He then goes on (admittedly in a kind of Fuller-language which is at first rather difficult to parse…) to suggest that in many cases, from a macro perspective, it would actually make sense to pay workers to stay at home instead. I could probably segue into a work-from-home blog post now, but I’ll stay on track…

Embodied energy

When you consider Chardenedes’ fuel accounting and the embodied energy of petroleum, it doesn’t take long to find other examples. Consider the humble aluminium drink can, which has a huge cost in energy to produce. In fact, recycling just one can saves enough energy (compared to producing a brand new an) to run a 100 watt bulb for 20 hours. Other examples include the aluminium framing on a solar panel, which actually costs the solar panel (in embodied energy), several years of work to pay itself off.

When you start to look, you’ll begin to notice that most everything around you has required a tremendous amount of (often non-renewable) energy to produce. We often focus on moving objects (cars, planes, ships, etc) when we consider energy use, yet the very computer you’re looking at is probably so costly from an environmental perspective, that all the productive work you create on it will never cover the environmental cost of its production.

1% for the Planet

I spoke about the environmental cost of the Internet few weeks ago, and how we try to make some vague calculations relative to our own carbon impact at Serversaurus, however I haven’t yet spoken about our donations to 1% For the Planet.

I’ll let this video do the speaking, but essentially 1% for the Planet encourages organisations to donate 1% of their turnover to environmental charity, as a [small] gesture in considering the macro environmental effects of doing business. Essentially this becomes a self-imposed tax. The whole story:

To avoid yet another middleman, 1% for the Planet does not act as a financial clearing house or financial distribution centre for corporate donations – it simply polices companies who are part of the program, to ensure they make their annual donations, provide tax return data and donation receipts.

Our donations thus far have been to help the anti-fracking efforts of Friends of the Earth and Surf Rider Foundation, who work to keep preserve our oceans and beaches.

Learn more and get involved at https://onepercentfortheplanet.org/

Carbon Sequestration

The process of planting trees to offset negative environmental impact (particularly related to industries producing CO2, ie. electricity) is commonly referred to as ‘carbon sequestration’. When electricity is generated for our server infrastructure, it is usually coming from a coal fed power grid, and is the reason why we intentionally carbon offset as much as we can – carbon offsetting is one of the few ways we as a company can mitigate the harm coal burning has on our environment.

Capture

As a tree grows, in produces oxygen, and absorbs CO2. However, the CO2 it absorbs does not ‘disappear’, but is held within the biomass of the tree itself. So, while the CO2 is temporarily captured, it will when the tree dies, technically reenter the atmosphere as the tree rots or is burned.

The earth is able to cope with a slow release of CO2 – what it can’t cope with, is the rapid production of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, which has led to what is now coined climate change.

In the case of reforestation, we’re capturing CO2 and essentially delaying it’s release to a time much further in the future – we’re using the natural cycle of nature as a battery to suck up as much CO2 as possible, and then releasing it slowly at a later date.

So, why bother? Other benefits

While reforestation has carbon capture benefits, it is not a solution unto itself, and is also not a fast enough method of capture to offset the speed at which humanity is releasing ancient CO2 gasses by burning fossil based fuels.

Benefits of reforestation are the production of oxygen, the attraction of rain, and the significant benefit of improving soil quality – trees are actively used to solve dryland salinity issues in areas such as the Murray Darling basin, which has suffered greatly after European colonisation through the creation of farmlands & pastures.

Oh, and trees are quite simply, awesome: To climb, to see, to seek shade under, and to admire.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the term used for expressing the capacity of a data network. The earth is surrounded by a complex network of cables, cell towers and satellites which power the Internet & mobile web, growing at a compound rate of 21% per year, and exceeding 1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes in annual traffic by 2016.

All of this data crisscrossing the globe requires energy – from the physical copper & fibre links, to powering the radio waves which penetrate the air for satellite and mobile connectivity.

The electricity used in data transmission for the average iPhone user (1.58Gb/month), is conservatively estimated to be ~361 kWh of electricity per year – or the equivalent of burning 121Kg of coal. To better understand this number, consider that there are roughly 3 million iPhones in Australia – if we average their usage to 1.58Gb/month, the total environmental cost in iPhone bandwidth usage (not including tablets, Android devices, etc) is equivalent to consuming 1.7 million barrels of oil, or having 157,000 cars on the road for an entire year.

These numbers for mobile energy consumption are regarded by some as being grossly conservative, with some estimates estimating the amount to be 4x greater.

A 2008 paper from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests it takes 13kWh to transmit 1GB across land based networks (the majority of the Internet). By this calculation, you can grab the bandwidth stats for your website (if you’re using one of our shared hosting accounts, you can navigate to your control panel, and view the Bandwidth section to see how much your site is consuming), and multiply it by 13. Once you have that number, head over to the EPA calculator, enter the number, and select ‘kilowatt-hours of electricity’ from the dropdown. You’ll then be presented with a host of calculations and equivalencies.

What can you do?

If you run a high traffic website, consider keeping your site efficient and fast. You can also think about using services such as our CDN, which reduces global network traffic by serving data as close to the client as possible. And of course, spread the word – it’s common knowledge that cars pollute – but your iPhone?

Conclusion

The cost both environmentally and in terms of pure dollars to pay for the electricity which powers the Internet is huge – however, if you’re a Serversaurus customer, your environmental debt has been partially paid for through our offsetting campaigns. While we do our best to calculate fairly, we can’t factor it all in, and unfortunately we’re only one of thousands of web hosts, with many not considering the environmental cost of their operations in the slightest.

Protip: Code and design for a lighter, faster, and more efficient web – not only is that huge image on the frontpage of your website poorly optimised and slow to load for visitors, but it’s also burning significant amounts of primarily dirty electricity!

Further reading:

• Sustainable Web Design
• The Surprisingly Large Energy Footprint of the Digital Economy
• Greenfleet

Tim Silverwood of Take3, an organisation which aims to encourage beach goers to take 3 pieces of garbage off of the beach on every visit, spoke of the key environmental issues revolving around plastics in Australia, and his rather encouraging take on the situation.

The key takeaways were:

National ban on plastic bags

Like the state of California and other regions of the world, Australia must take action and ban bags nationally. The duopoly of Coles & Woolworths will not take this initiative on their own. Countless campaigns have tried, however unfortunately these large corporations wish to be part of the problem, instead of the solution – without government intervention, the biggest producers of single-use plastic bags will continue to give them away to consumers. It’s unfortunate the government has to take a big brother approach on corporate activities like this, and it’s disappointing these organisations can’t innovate and lead with their own initiative for the betterment of the community and our environment.

National ban on the use of micro-beads

If you haven’t already heard about micro-beads, they are an incredible mis-use of resources and the epitome of short term thinking. Large cosmetics manufacturers insert tiny balls of plastic as exfoliation elements into their products. These tiny pieces of plastics go down the drain, and straight into our waterways. In the documentary trailer for BAYKEEPERS below, you’ll see how this is impacting local areas such as Port Phillip bay in Melbourne. Manufacturers who are culprits of micro bead manufacture include Colgate-Palmolive, L’Oréal, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and others. Many companies have vowed to discontinue micro bead use, however giants such as Unilever have no intention to stop until well into 2017.

National bottle refund program

In many countries, the return of recyclable bottles is rewarded – in Germany, bottles can be returned at supermarkets, where dockets are printed and immediately available for use within the supermarket – you can effectively trade bottles directly for food.

In Australia, we have no such program except in South Australia, where bottles can be returned and rewarded at up to 10cents per return. As a kid I remember asking my dad whether we could fill a trailer up with cans and drive to Adelaide…

This lack of a refund scheme which rewards people for returning cans and bottles is both disappointing and nonsensical. Again, this issue falls into the political sphere, and requires government intervention to help resolve – as the slow wheels of political change move, bottles continue to float swiftly out into our last remaining wild areas.

Tim Silverwood

Tim Silverwood speaks passionately about change, and gives off an aura of positivity which can sometimes be lost in environmental campaigners – campaigning is almost always an uphill battle. Tim thinks these key issues and more can be solved within 5 years, and I actually believe him – which isn’t something I often feel!

Following Tim’s intro, we watched the really excellent local documentary BAYKEEPERS from filmmaker Michael J. Lutman – not only is the story and message engaging, but the editing and production value of the film is exceptional – if you can, be sure to find a full version of the documentary.

We see again and again, that in a world dominated by corporatism, a fundamental change in the very DNA of business is required – we cannot only rely on our governments to guide us – they have had, and will continue to have a significant role, however business is often operating one step ahead and with greater agility – let’s make that step the right one.

In a recent talk I will blog about another day, a representative from Bankmecu spoke about our biggest communicator: The money in our pockets. Use this communicator to communicate your values, and fight to support the individuals and businesses which have foresight, insight and a purpose which reaches beyond the simplistic notion of profits for stakeholders.