Going Green at Google

GREEN EMPLOYEE PROGRAMS

Google's green employee programs are designed to reduce its corporate carbon footprint, and help its employees stay green too.

Bikes on Campus

At Google's Mountain View headquarters, shared bicycles are scattered among its buildings for employees to use for short trips around campus, reducing the need for employee car trips during the work day.


Biodiesel Shuttles

Google offers an extensive shuttle service that brings more than 1,500 employees to work from around the Bay Area every day. These shuttles are fueled by B20 biodiesel.

Composting

Waste from its Mountain View, CA cafes is separated and the organic component is composted. As a result, it has reduced waste sent to landfills, reduced greenhouse gases, and recycled nutrients leading to improved soil quality without chemicals. In addition, it has reduced the overall number of disposable items in its micro-kitchens and cafés. Any disposable plateware and cutlery they continue to use in the cafés is now compostable. I suggest bringing one's own nonplastic plateware and cutlery to work.

GFleet

This Mountain View program is designed to support alternative commuting through a car-sharing program that is free to Google employees. Within this fleet, it has eight plug-in hybrid vehicles which are parked under a solar panel carport at Google's headquarters.

Green Design Elements

The buildings at its main campus in Mountain View use sustainable building materials that are environmentally friendly and healthier for employees, such as "cradle-to-cradle" certified products designed to never end up in landfills, fresh air ventilation, daylighting, and PVC- and formaldehyde-free materials whenever possible.

Locally-grown Food

Google chefs are committed to using as many local, organic, sustainable ingredients as possible. Café 150, for example, sources ingredients for everything on the menu from within 150 miles. It also has a seasonal farmers market in Mountain View and an organic garden in the main courtyard.

Residential Solar Program

Google has partnered with several residential solar companies to offer discounts to employees who want to go solar at home.

Self-Powered Commuter Program

Employees who bike, walk, pogo-stick, unicycle, or otherwise self-power to work can earn points that translate into a donation from Google to a charity of their choice.

Google's green thumb sets a wonderful example for other corporations!

Google Wave to be released to 100,000 testers today

(CNN) John D. Sutter

GOOGLE WAVE, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers today.

The web application from GOOGLE combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communications called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave."

Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco in May. The closed group of beta testers will help Google fish bugs out of the application before a public release by the end of the year, according to the Google Wave Web site.

The application was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian brothers who developed Google Maps. The Rasmussen brothers said they hope Google Wave will eventually replace e-mail as the main way people converse on the Internet.

"This should be something everybody knows," Jens Rasmussen said.

In Wave, e-mail-like communications can be edited by several users simultaneously. And users can chat about certain sections of Wave documents in real time, where all users see what a person is typing as it is typed. If a person comes to the conversation late, they can replay everything they've missed.

The Rasmussens hope these functions will make online communications more efficient and collaborative. Jens Rasmussen said e-mail is a computer version of snail mail. Wave will be something new, a real-time communication system designed specifically to today's faster-paced, multitasking Internet.

"We have a strong tendency to just take things we know and just adapt them to the digital world," he said.

Tech bloggers have largely cheered the release of the product. But there are some concerns that the application may be too complicated for mainstream Web users.

In a video demonstration, the Rasmussens spend an hour and 20 minutes explaining the Wave.

Initial reviews of Wave also noted a number of glitches in the application. Ben Parr of the social-media blog Mashable writes that Wave still has bugs but that the product is improving over time. "As an initial user of Wave, I have to tell you: things have gotten much more stable. It still has a slow response time in certain situations and it can still crash, but these things can happen far less often than they used to," he writes.

The blog TechCrunch wrote that Wave "drips with ambition" and will be a "new communication platform for a new Web."

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We shall see!

http://whoseroleisitanyway.blogspot.com/