Good for Cisco, good for the Earth: Cisco promises to cut down its carbon footprint 25% by 2012

Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is promising to cut the company’s carbon footprint by 25% by 2012. In his message to attendees of Cisco Live!, the annual Cisco IT conference being held in

Orlando, Fla., this week, Chambers publicly laid down the plan. Besides being good for the environment, trimming back energy used by the company will be an object lesson for its customers, which could in turn be good for business. Two of Cisco’s energy-saving efforts call for deploying Cisco gear, and that could be good for Cisco sales if its customers follow its example.

Chambers says the company spit out 832,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2007, which includes emissions from buildings, vehicles and air travel. When run through an EPA algorithm, the net CO2e Cisco put out was 724,000 metric tons. Cisco is aiming to cut that to 543,000 metric tons by 2012.

To achieve this goal Cisco says it will better monitor its energy use, use more efficient lab gear that eats up less energy, use virtualization technology for storage, automatically shut down idle equipment and upgrade mechanical and electrical systems in buildings to more efficient technology. The company will also extend its use of its own telepresence equipment to replace some business travel, which represents 27% of all of Cisco’s greenhouse gas production, the company says. And it will deploy more of its energy efficient Cisco Connected Workspace equipment at more sites.

Cisco plans to use software and an IP building-management system to run its facilities more efficiently and predict potential energy savings. As the company builds new facilities and revamps old ones it will use new standards that are environmentally friendly, and to buy power from renewable energy sources.

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Jim Duffy has been covering technology for over 28 years, 23 at Network World. He covers enterprise networking infrastructure, including routers and switches. He also writes The Cisco Connection blog and can be reached on Twitter @Jim_Duffy and at jduffy@nww.com.