It Turns out Apple isn't so Green After All...

You may remember how apple has branded itself many times in the past with its clean, green, energy efficient image of long battery lives, smart production, and environmentally-conscious computers. The new macbook pro was advertised with images of green grass, blue skies, and bright sunshine in every Apple store, and they vowed to help recycle old computers. Well... they didn't quite cover all their bases on their green front; it turns out much of this effort was simply Greenwashing.

A report issued today by Greenpeace ranks tech companies by how "green" they are, based on an index that takes into account the kind of energy they use to power their data centers, manufacturing plants, and other facilities. Most of their energy use went into the data centers used to feed though all internet traffic used by Apple and its products, such as iTunes. As it turns out, a whopping two thirds of the energy for these data centers is provided by coal, arguably the dirtiest fuel used worldwide. The cleanest marks went to Google and Yahoo, who have made huge strides in making their data centers and operations more efficient.

We need companies to be smarter about their energy use. When you upload a video to Youtube, do you wanna feel guilty for adding more carbon emissions to the environment? Apple should take Facebook's lead, and disclose the information about their data centers, and start using more renewable energy, such as Solar Power, Wind, and Geothermal, to feed their huge hunger for energy. It's the responsible and smart thing to do, for the company that paints themselves as responsible, user-friendly, and efficient.
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Data Centers: Hidden Behemoths of the Internet

When you type a search into google, it scans billions of pages, delivering your results totalling possibly in the millions, or in the dozens, in a fraction of a second. How does it do that? Data centers. Information hosted on the internet has to have a place to stay both when being used and for simple storage. The more information a website hosts and indexes, the more data is produced in these centers, and are archived in massive arrays of servers. When you host a website, often your information gets stored on a server somewhere in your webhost's data center. With the huge influx of information into the internet rising exponentially, how we are storing this data is becoming a huge problem, both online and offline. Data centers for huge websites are massive energy sinks, using up large amounts of electricity to cool the servers as they heat up from running through so much information on a second-by-second basis. It's quickly becoming one of the major sources of energy use in our country. There is a huge need for sustainability in data centers. Many web hosts these days are offering green solutions: a small surcharge to ensure that the carbon emitted into the environment for your website's information storage in their data center is offset. Its different though for huge web corporations that use up so much energy they can't just offset their carbon.

This is what a typical server array in a Data Center looks like.

Take Facebook, a website with over 500 million users, who upload millions of images a day, posting almost 20,000 comments every second. Each bit of info uploaded to facebook goes into their data center's dedicated servers, and they are running out of space. Now, facebook is planning on building a new data center, one that uses passive heating and cooling to lower energy use, as well as relying on fewer batteries for backup power in case of a blackout. Not only that, but theyre planning everything in an open environment, posting images of the blueprints, details, as well as providing information on their new data center. This will hopefully raise awareness of the hidden energy being wasted by our fiddling on the internet.

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