Sustainable Business

Radar 7/8 of video weekly on a smartphone consumes annually more electricity in the remote networks than two new refrigerators use in a year. The world's Information Communications Technologies (ICT) ecosystem uses about 1,500 TWh of electricity annually, equal to all the electricity generated in Japan and Germany combined and as much electricity as was used for global illumination in 1985. Aiming to tackle this, companies such as Google are trying to understand the carbon footprint of its users. Last month, Google announced that is has estimated its carbon footprint per user and says it is equivalent, on a monthly basis, to driving a car for one mile. The company believes that in serving an average user, it emits 8g of carbon per day. In making such a calculation, it is assumed that an active Google user is someone who does 25 searches, watches 60 minutes of YouTube a day, has a Gmail account and uses other Google services. Click here keep up-to-date with the latest news from edie.net Water Businesses report mixed performance on water reduction Retail fashion firm C&A has entered into a partnership with Water Footprint Network to analyse and tackle water use across its international value chain for the manufacture of cotton products. The work will seek to address identified hot spots that arise during textile production, such as excessive use of water, or the use of environmentally harmful processes. C&A particularly wants to examine and compare the levels of harmful pollutants that are released into the environment - specifically into fresh water - during conventional and organic cotton cultivation. Studies already undertaken have shown that with conventional cultivation, the grey water footprint of cotton is about five times larger than if an organic method of cultivation is used. A primary contributor to the bigger water footprint is the use of chemical pesticides on conventional farms. Beverage company Diageo has improved water efficiency throughout its operations by 1.5% and reduced the volume of water wasted in waterstressed locations by 7%, according to the company's 2013 sustainability report. In addition, the producer of Guinness and Smirnoff reported a 4% reduction of absolute water withdrawals, which equates to 994,000 cubic metres. The absolute volume of water used fell by almost 1 million cubic metres in the period, despite a 6% increase in overall production volume. This was largely due to an increase in production output and the integration of newly acquired businesses in Turkey and India. The 1.5% improvement has moved the company a step closer to its water efficiency improvement target of 30% by 2015 having made total improvements of 19.5% since 2007. While confident of hitting the target Diageo has acknowledged that efficiencies will become progressively

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