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Going A Little Overboard: Online Advertisers Urged To Measure Their Environmental Impact
from the uh,-really? dept
The tech industry's attempts to "get green" have been a mixed bag. While some companies have made legitimate moves to reduce their energy usage through greater efficiency, some efforts, like Dell's plan to plant trees in Second Life in honor of Earth Day, have been little more than publicity stunts. Now a group called the Institute for Sustainable Communications is urging digital content firms to become aware of their carbon footprint, even to the point of calculating the energy needed to run a banner ad. This is pretty silly, if for no other reason than the fact that electronic content is a substitute for other forms of media (like print), which have a much greater impact on the environment. Although the servers needed to run a website do consume electricity, an assessment that takes the bigger picture into account would likely conclude that electronic media has a positive environmental impact.
