The Green Team Commits - Let the battle begin!

This week, eBay announced that by 2012 it will reduce its corporate emissions by 15% over its 2008 baseline.

http://news.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=410332

Let me break this down for you. This is not just some corporate marketing gimic or easily attainable goal to get press coverage - it is very real and affects my world directly.  As you saw in the release, eBay is firmly committed to making this happen, but it will not be easy. More than half of eBay's emissions come from our Data Centers. From a carbon perspective, we are in the belly of the beast and will be fighting for every metric ton we remove. An aggresive strategy is underway to reduce both our financial as well as our carbon burdon. The Data Center operations teams in partnership with the Green Team have multi-prong, multi-year projects in play that will ultimately lead to eBay reaching this goal. From an operations standpoint it is all about fine tuning the Data Center "machine", holisitically, to achieve operational excellence.

The teams are clear that success is not measured with a single metric. It is a combination of metrics. We also believe operations and sustainability are synonymous with each other. The operations strategy is to deliver Availability, Cost Control and Agility by levearing our talent pool and innovating at every level. But we also view all aspects of operations through a sustainability lens. In our business if any of these components are missing, you're not addressing the entire problem. For example, we can meet our availability numbers but miss our carbon reduction goal because of excessive, inefficient, redundancy. On the other hand, we could drive our sustainability focus and miss our cost reduction goals. It is an eco system and requires the right balance to be successful. 

Over the next 12 months we will be sharing the results of the many battles that the operations team is fighting to win this war against carbon and contribute to the Green Team goal.  Leonidas, King of Sparta phrased it perfectly in 480 BC - "No retreat, no surrender."  He just never wore a suit. :-)

Dean