Through its blog this week, Google announced its new commitment towards achieving zero waste to landfill from its data center operations. Google mentioned that six of its data centers and resources are aiming to reduce energy for effective and efficient operations, based on a standard created by UL Environment.
Rachel Futrell, Program Manager at Google said in the blog :
Over the past few years we’ve started focusing downstream on what resources we’re generating via waste.
We’ve been working towards zero waste to landfill at our facilities, as well as reducing the amount of waste we’re generating.
Today, we are announcing a new commitment to achieve Zero Waste to Landfill for our global data center operations.
Futrell explained that the initiative will cause 100% of waste to be diverted to ‘more sustainable pathways’ and only in cases where there is no better alternative will a maximum of 10% go to a waste-to-energy facility.
It was also mentioned that six of Google’s fourteen data centers are achieving 100% diversion, including its APAC data centers in Changhua County, Taiwan and Singapore.
The company’s US data center in Oklahoma is the first data center to reach zero waste to landfill and the company says that this has been of huge benefit.
Futrell added :
Not only does it help divert waste more effectively, it also gives us accurate weight data for tracking, reduces the number of pick-ups our vendor has to make (saving us and them time and money) and is cleaner overall for the site (reducing how much janitorial work is needed).