Rackspace® takes the environment seriously and has several initiatives towards making our company greener and reducing our carbon footprint.
Rackspace became one of the UK's first hosting companies to offer carbon neutral hosting through tree planting in October 2006 when it partnered with the ITF, the world's longest standing tree planting charity. So far Rackspace is planting between 300-400 trees a month and has already filled up two sites in Pembrokeshire, Wales with nearly 2,000 trees and we are now rapidly filling up a new site in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. In turn this project enables Rackspace customers to lower their own carbon footprint through tree planting, which mitigates the carbon generated through the servers.
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Rackspace's carbon neutral initiative is about more than just tree planting, other projects include the utilisation of a data centre, opened in June 2008, that utilises the latest power efficient technology and runs on environmentally friendly energy. The data centre agreement with property and investment group SEGRO (Slough Estates Group) provides Rackspace with the ability to reduce its dependency on fossil fuel, as well as provide a more efficient way to manage its customers' needs.
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Rackspace also uses energy efficient Dell AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon servers which have low voltage processors, SFF hard drives and DDR2 memory, meaning they consume less power than prior server models.
Rackspace also has a significant recycling initiative in the office, using only paper from sustainable sources and recycling all aluminium cans, paper, cardboard and plastic through both the local council and a company called PaperRound. In 2006 Rackspace recycled 2,130 kg paper and 185 kg cans and plastic bottles saving the equivalent of 25 trees and 10,900 kWh of energy.
In addition Rackspace only uses environmentally friendly cleaning products.
