Found this press release on eBay’s Green team.  I’ve always believed Green efforts are more credible when coming from the grassroots of employees who want to make a difference.

The eBay Green Team initiative grew out of a grassroots effort begun in 2007 by a small group of passionate eBay employees who wanted to put their environmental values to work. Today, more than 1,000 eBay employees in 18 countries are Green Team members, supporting environmental causes in their local communities and championing sustainable business practices within eBay. When the company needed more office space, the Green Team led eBay to construct the first building built to LEED Gold Standards in San Jose, CA, featuring the city's largest solar panel installation. eBay has also been a carbon neutral company since 2007 through commitments to energy efficiency, alternative power, green buildings and carbon offsets, thanks to efforts by the eBay Green Team.

The last sentence is little known.  eBay has been carbon neutral since 2007.  Why? What is the business justification? Try stopping 1,000 passionate green employees who want to make a difference and think their company should be carbon neutral.

Curious I went to one of my earliest blog entries on eWaste which was about eBay’s rethink web site.  In that entry the list of companies on eBay’s rethink site were.

Apple, Best Buy,Circuit City, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Toshiba, UPS, USPS, Verizon.

Now the list has grown.

• Apple
• Basel Action
  Network
• Best Buy
• CollectiveGood Foundation
• CEA-Consumer Electronics Association
• Circuit City
• CTIA-The Wireless Association ™
• Dell
• Earth 911
• EPA
• Gateway
• Goodwill
• Hewlett-Packard
• IBM
• Ingram Micro
• Intel
• International Association of Electronics Recyclers
• March of Dimes
• Motorola
• National Cristina Foundation
• Nokia
• Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
• Toshiba
• USPS
• UPS
• Verizon Wireless
• The Wireless
  Foundation

*One bug, don’t know quite what defines new, but the list had BestBuy, Circuit City, and Toshiba on the web site in 2007, and Mar 2009, the companies are still listed as new.

Spam filtering is a necessity of email, and we have all gone through the difficulty of missing an important piece of email because it went to your spam folder.  WSJ has a short post on one alternative.

Email With a Ribbon on It

Goodmail Systems Inc. has developed a way to fight email fraud like phishing, the scam that uses what appear to be legitimate email messages from companies or other organizations to get victims to reveal information like Social Security numbers or credit-card account passwords.

Goodmail, a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $20 million in Series C funding last month from investors led by Bessemer Venture Partners to support its email-certification business.

Goodmail's clients are companies, nonprofits and government agencies that want consumers to be able to tell that the email the organization sends them is legitimate. Clients route their email to consumers through Goodmail, which tags each message with a blue-ribbon icon to show it isn't fraudulent. Goodmail currently handles about three billion messages a month.

I wonder how many email alerts from IT systems go to the spam folder especially when sent outside the company domain to service partners?

If you have this problem, feel free to comment to this post.

cnet newsblog has an article about when used servers cost most than new

GALWAY, Ireland--Think of the Multis Group as sort of the Antiques Roadshow of the server world.

The Galway, Ireland-based company specializes in refurbishing, and then selling, used servers. Refurbished PCs and servers are increasingly in vogue because remanufacturing represents a more environmentally efficient way to recycle old electronics than harvesting components from these old machines or melting them down for raw materials.

Multis, in fact, plans to open a 70,000-square-foot facility in Union City, Calif., later this month to refurbish and sell servers for North American customers. That marks a reversal in the usual U.S.-Ireland tech relationship.

Unlike refurbished PCs and cell phones, servers maintain a high resale value that can equal or even exceed the cost of new equipment, said Multis CEO and founder Sean Keenan. Why? Manufacturers might produce only a single server model for 18 months to two years. Corporate customers, however, often don't want to migrate to new hardware that quickly. Instead, they move at a three- to seven-year pace. As a result, they often have a need for discontinued equipment.

People should consider contacting Multis to discuss end of life for their servers and an eWaste plan as part of creating a green data center.

The eWaste momentum continues with the EPA's partnership with AT&T Wireless, Best Buy, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Office Depot, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Staples, and T-Mobile to recycle old cel phones. It's only a matter of time before the momentum shifts to IT equipment.

"Thanks to our Plug-In partners' efforts, recycling an old cell phone has become a quick and easy way for Americans to help protect the environment," said Susan Bodine, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. "By dropping it off at a store or sending it through the mail, Americans have more recycling options today than ever before."
To kick-off the campaign, EPA released today a series of print public service announcements, "Recycle Your Cell Phone. It's An Easy Call," which highlight the convenience and environmental and social benefits of recycling a cell phone. EPA also introduced a podcast that addresses many common questions on cell phone recycling.
EPA started the campaign because many consumers still do not know where or how they can recycle their unwanted cell phones. Consequently, less than 20 percent of unwanted cell phones are recycled each year.
Recycling a cell phone offers an opportunity for everyone to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save energy, and conserve natural resources. An estimated 100 to 130 million cell phones are no longer being used, many languishing in storage. If Americans recycled 100 million phones, we could save enough upstream energy to power more than 194,000 U.S. households for a year. If consumers were able to reuse those 100 million cell phones, the environmental savings would be even greater, saving enough energy to power more than 370,000 U.S. homes each year.