hackr

english edition


Who Is The Greenest?

sustainable logo Nice idea from Qype’s CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher: since he didn’t see any awareness regarding environmental issues or a discussion on the ethical implications of business with his friends and relations in the German startup scene whatsoever – folks rather make it a competition boasting about the many times they spend at various airports on Twitter etc., he had a moment of truth a few weeks ago:

A couple of weeks ago a very small thing happened. We finally managed to start the separation of paper from other rubbish in our office. Originally, this posed a problem, because there was no separate collection of rubbish in our office building. But after a couple of phone calls, the landlord put a container for recycled paper into the entrance of our building.

Mimicry is one of our most useful capabilities and four other companies followed and did the same. For Stephan this was a small bang in his personal experience, his lever might be bigger than he thought.

So he started the blog Sustainabl in which he documents Qype’s efforts in becoming a greener company – and maybe for challenging other companies to do the same.

  • We now separate paper in our office from the rest of our rubbish
  • In process of switching our electricity provider to a green provider
  • In our kitchen, we changed the lightbulbs to energy saving ones
  • Our fruit (Bananas, the staple for web development) is now being bought from the organic corner of the super market. Drinks have always come in return bottles, which is no special achievement in Germany.
  • We will probably switch our coffee to fair trade, but I still need to ask our local provider about it. At least, providing our own cappucino to our people dramatically reduces the need for paper cups from Coffee shops.
  • Standby Power: This is still an issue with all of us, but maybe blogging about it helps.
  • Office lighting. I need to publish some fotos of this. Here we have the classic dilemma: We have very ugly neon lamps on the ceiling and in an attempt to improve this, we bought uplights last year, which obviously consume much more energy and I suspect the dimmers do so as well. At least we changed the light bulbs in our kitchen to energy saving ones.

Since the investors are resistant to video conferencing and since they are operating in Germany and the UK Qype’s biggest eco-sin is air travel, but Greenmiles might help them to travel emission free.

Let us know in the comments if your company does something similar, we would love to know about more interventions like this.

If you need some inspirations check out these sites:

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)
☍ 30.08.2007 # green qype