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Here at Utopia Net, we pride ourselves on being environmentally responsible and, since our founding in 2000, we have worked hard to keep our operations efficient and to limit our impact on the environment. We also understand we can't eliminate that impact, so we work with several organizations to counter what we can't avoid.
For every new hosting account at Utopia Net we will plant one tree! We spent a lot of time researching other options for offsetting our impact, including Renewable Energy Certificates, and feel like we've made the right choice. Lots of other companies are offsetting some of their energy use with RECs. At this point, however, the effectiveness of those certificates is unclear, and the purchaser's actual energy use is still almost entirely generated by greenhouse gas producing fossil fuels. If better REC options and/or new options for purchasing renewable energy become available to us, we will eagerly take another look.
In the mean time, the trees we're planting have a clear and cumulative effect on the environment and on greenhouse gas levels. The average tree inhales 26 lbs of carbon dioxide per year and exhales enough oxygen for a family of four for a year. Trees also reflect solar radiation back into space and increase cloud cover, both of which help counteract global warming. We have partnered with MokuGift and the UN Environment Program for this project. Planting trees through these groups has the added benefit of teaching sustainable agriculture in impoverished parts of the world.
The vast majority of the impact Utopia Net has on the environment is through the electricity our servers and related equipment use. Luckily for us, with today's energy prices, being green and being cost effective can go hand in hand. We are constantly working to reduce our costs and our impact by leveraging new technologies to lower power consumption, using natural DC cooling technology, and using virtualization software to scale efficiently.