appiChar achieves CarbonZero status

appiChar has committed to becoming CarbonZero by joining co2balance, who will be planting sufficient new trees in reclaimed farm land to off-set our calculated amounts of CO2 emissions. 

By becoming CarbonZero, appiChar’s overall aim is to counterbalance the emissions caused by the use of everyday energy at our offices and also in business-related travel. We hope that this will help raise the issue, particularly in relation to the use of IT and where there are areas for our customers to make savings.

Aside from appiChar’s CarbonZero commitment and the direct environmental benefits, we will continue to ensure that our customers are advised on the options to make full use of the equipment they already have rather than replacing unnecessarily. For example, we have recently completed a project to turn 150+ PCs in thin-client computers thus extending their practical life by a number of years.

Where new PCs are required, appiChar will be making them CarbonZero for their first year of life at no extra charge. Oxford University has estimated the CO2 emissions from one 'always-on' PC at 716kg per year, almost the equivalent to driving from London to Moscow AND BACK.

This number can be reduced greatly by making sure PCs are switched off when they aren’t being used, but helping to off-set the CO2 from essential use helps highlight the problem and also helps by the equivalent amount of CO2 being removed from the atmosphere. In a recent study, it was estimated that the top 200 companies in the UK waste £61 million per year, or 2.8 million kilowatt hours just by leaving PCs switched on.

appiChar Director, Ian Ryder, said “Organisations of all sizes have to think seriously about their environmental impacts and take positive action to mitigate them where they can. Most of the energy used in this country is still created by burning fossil fuels and the subsequent CO2 being released has now been proven to be helping to warm the planet. We hope that by offering this service to our customers we are helping to raise awareness of the issues while at the same taking back some of the CO2 we and our customers are responsible for.”