Capturing value from waste in upstate New York
Smelling the carpet: Making buildings healthier, along with the people in them
Putting down local roots where Googles European data centers are growing
Googles food program feeds employees in more than 200 cafs and 1,000 self-service kitchens across the globe, while fine-tuning every step in the food service process, from procurement to prep to plate to disposal, in support of the companys sustainability goals. To reduce food waste, Google cafs started buying and serving ugly produce.
Reaching our solar potential, one rooftop at a time
Transparency unleashed: How Global Fishing Watch is transforming fishery management
Earth Engine creates a living map of forest loss
The many lives of tech — Inside the circular economy of Google data centers
The Google Earth team set out to visualize and monitor forest changes in high resolution across the entire globe. To create the global forest map, Earth Engine used a network of cloud-based servers to process 650,000 images across 10,000 computers working in parallel. It would have taken a solo computer 15 years to do the job.
In 2017 Google will reach its goal of 100% renewable energy. This represents great progress, but it falls short of our next ambition: for every data center to cover its own consumption with clean energy. Our data centers in Finland and the Netherlands have achieved this goal, and its resulting in benefits for the company and the planet.
Recipe for sustainability: Why Google cafes love ugly produce
Northern exposure: How our Nordic renewable deals are reaping rewards
Greening the grid: how Google buys renewable energy
Transparency unleashed: How Global Fishing Watchs vessel monitoring platform is transforming fishery management
Sustainability is part of everything we do at Google. We are committed to renewable energy, efficient operations, and using data and information to help with issues like deforestation, overfishing, and air pollution.
Using healthy building materials has been a major focus for Googles real estate team since our early days as a company. In 2012, the team started developing Portico, a tool aimed at vetting the quality of construction materials.
Putting down local roots where Googles European data centers are growing
Google Street View cars are driving around pretty much everywhere, capturing 360-degree photos for Google Maps. In 2014, Google started equipping Street View cars in certain cities with sensors to measure air pollutants and the overall air quality of an area.
As data centers are one of the worlds fastest-growing electricity users, its good business sense for Google to go sustainable and good corporate citizenship to help others move in that direction. How? Through power purchase agreements (PPAs): large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy in volumes that would meet the needs of our business.
Putting down local roots where Googles European data centers are growing
Mapping the invisible: Street View cars add air pollution sensors
100% renewable is just the beginning
The global fish population is in crisis; some species numbers have dropped by a staggering 90%. Google is partnering with Global Fishing Watch to bring transparency to fishing activity across the globe and combat illegal fishing.
Machine learning finds new ways for our data centers to save energy
Oceans of data: tracking illegal fishing over 1.4 billion square miles
Google has been thinking about data center efficiency for as long as weve been thinking about data centers. We used machine learning to produce a reduction in both energy used for cooling and in overall energy overhead.
In 2007, Google made a commitment to be a carbon neutral company and weve met this goal every year for the past decade. In that time, weve partnered with more than 40 carbon offset projects to offset more than 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).
Project Sunroof puts Googles expansive data in mapping and computing resources to use for people and organizations interested in solar power.