SkyTV, Carbon Neutral?
Posted: Wed 29 October, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, General, Green, Thoughts 2 Comments »Travelling behind a Sky TV van (sorry, their proper name is BSkyB, but who remembers that?) I noticed that they’re now saying that Sky is “Carbon Neutral”, according to the Carbon Neutral Trust.
And that’s just left me incredulous. Thankfully, I’m not the only one – as can be seen here, among other places. From that story, the following :
Sky’s carbon footprint has been calculated by measuring the CO2 equivalent emissions from its premises, company owned vehicles, business travel and waste to landfill. It claims to have lowered its site-related operational emissions by 47 per cent in the last 18 months and has also negotiated discounts for staff wanting to buy low emission hybrid cars
© Tech Digest 2008
So it’s not actually taking into account all the Sky boxes that are left on Standby overnight, let alone the Sky+ boxes etc. – and until it does, I for one would dispute the true “Carbon Neutral” status of Sky.
Oh my lord this is my bandwagon big time. Carbon Neutral (and being a very eco concious designer and having written a thesis on the subject I know) is where the output of a business in terms of emissions is mitigated by it’s ability to soak this up or remove carbon from the atmosphere thus having no negative impact in terms of emissions. It is damn near impossible to be carbon neutral in any way because modern human life uses energy to function thus to be carbon neutral in the true sense you have to use no energy – therefore this claim is utter rubbish and I would love to see how they could substantiate it. The best argument for me would be to ask them how they have mitigated the environmental impact of their buildings, products and transport in terms of embodied energy (the energy required to produce an item). At best this could take between 60-100 years for the very best energy efficient building which produces more energy through green energy production than it needs and thus passes energy into the national grid through an inverter. Mr Sky is talking testicles me thinks!
Hi,
I thought it might be useful to post a few details about what we at Sky have been doing to reduce our impact on the environment and to explain why we call ourselves a CarbonNeutral company.
In a nutshell, to become CarbonNeutral, a company must reduce its carbon emissions to net zero through a mixture of internal reductions and best practice carbon offsetting (to find out more, see: http://www.carbonneutral.com).
We’ve done just that, as well as working to help reduce emissions outside of our own footprint. We want to do more, but I hope that the details below give you a flavour of what we’ve done to date.
Bella Vuillermoz
Sky
What has Sky done to reduce its own environmental impact?
We’ve taken a series of steps to cut our carbon emissions: from fitting air conditioning units with chilled beam technology and installing presence detection sensors for lighting to training our installers how to drive more economically and trialling vehicles fuelled by sustainable bio-fuel. We secure 100% of energy for our UK sites from renewable sources. And we are consolidating our data centres from more than a dozen to just two, which store up to 10 times as much data for the same power usage.
All these actions add up and, over the past four years, as a group we’ve reduced our emissions by 16% (not the 47% mentioned in the article above), at a time when we’ve also significantly grown our business.
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve then used high quality offsets – like wind and hydro power projects – for remaining, unavoidable emissions.
We measured our carbon footprint in 2004 and we now update and audit this every year. Not only does this help us map out what we can do next to further reduce our emissions, but it helps us and others to monitor progress over time.
What is Sky doing to help customers take action on the environment?
We help customers to reduce their own impact on the environment in two ways – firstly, we are working to reduce the power consumption of Sky set top boxes and, secondly, we want to help, inspire and motivate people to make changes themselves.
We’ve halved the power consumption of the standard Sky box since its launch. We’ve also downloaded a world first auto standby feature to over four million of our set top boxes (by automatically putting boxes into standby overnight, we’ve saved over £16 million on our customers’ energy bills and 77,500 tonnes of CO2 – more than Sky’s entire carbon footprint).
We have a dedicated area of the website to help you reduce your footprint; and on screen, we air programming like our exclusive interview with Al Gore, along with the UK TV premiere of his film, an Inconvenient Truth.
And earlier this year, we agreed a new three-year partnership with Global Action Plan, the practical environmental charity. Our first initiative is the new ‘Appetite for Action’, which aims to educate and inspire over a million primary school pupils and their 5,000 schools to think about, and reduce, food waste.
What is Sky doing to help its employees to take action on the environment?
We offer employees tax-free bike loans, as well as discounts and cash-back on hybrid cars. We run shuttle-buses to our offices from major stations, so people can use public transport to get to work instead of driving. And we offer an online carbon credit card, where staff can bank credits for environmental activities like cycling to work, which can then be redeemed for rewards.
Global Action Plan are also rolling out their ‘Evergreen’ programme (which uses volunteers to build sustainable projects in housing associations) with the help of staff in our Scottish contact centres.