Carbon Audit - Executive Summary

Carbon Planet conducted a comprehensive audit of the greenhouse gas emissions accountable to Cleartext for the 2006/07 financial year.

The aim of this process was to define and establish an operational boundary to account for direct and indirect GHG emissions (scope 1, scope 2, scope 3) that constitute to Cleartexts inventory for the purpose of removing those emissions with carbon credit offsets. A further aim was to identify areas where GHG emissions may be able to be reduced in subsequent years.

Carbon Planets CO2 free audits are in accordance with the standards outlined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol in the Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (2004) [1] and ISO 14064-1 specifications for quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

Elucidation of the activities and items contributing to GHG emissions involves obtaining an organisational inventory of services and processes used as a result of operations within the established organisational boundary.

What does this mean in our day to day activities?

Apart from the audit and purchasing the carbon offets we do at least the following in our daily activities;

• Where possible we turn off all electrical devices when not in use
• We have significantly reduced the amount of print paper we use
• Purchase recycled paper and re-use paper within the office
• Use public transport for business travel where possible
• Purchase environmentally friendly products and services when possible
• Champion the cause by encouraging clients and business partners to 'go green'.

During 2008 we moved to embrace OS virtualization by rebuilding all our office systems using Linux and VMWare Server. This has reduce the number of operational servers we need to have running.

Our new and upgraded services are being deployed on Linux servers running Xen virtualization which again reduces the number of physical servers and therefore power that we are using.

Virtualization is a great way of reducing power and materials consumption and carries a nice side effect which is that whole machine backups and provisioing of extra servers, or reducing the number of servers in use is greatly simplified.