How does energy efficiency in the workplace impact global warming?
It's huge. One of the largest issues that we've seen in terms of our own operation is that when we're not in the office, we have all of these gear turned on using electricity. We integrated the kill switch which enables us to reduce our consumption of energy. One of the other aspects is that you know we are a growing company, and other than renting a stand alone building and monopolizing the power and the space, what we've done is, we've done a co-operative workhouse, so there's 28 different people sharing the same resources that one organization would. We're reducing our use of energy and our impact. Another aspect, too, is that the use of energy is very important in a business. You have to pay your electrical bills, you have the phone bill, and you have the lights and all of these gadgets, and ultimately they all require energy. What people don't realize is that a lot of electricity is made from burning of fossil fuels. A lot of electricity is made from hydro-electric currents and we're now seeing the beginning of solar power. What we've learned in operating earth friendly removing, is that we were actually able to harness and make our own electricity driving around in trucks running on used vegetable oil. What we found was that if we put a larger alternator on the engine, we were able to actually harness DC power and then invert that DC power to AC power, thus making our own electricity to power up a machine that makes the replacement to the bubble rack. What we found is that we have a surplus of electricity. What we do at the end of the day is pull up the truck to the building and we plug in, offload our power, put it back on the grid, and we spin the meter back about eight bucks a day per truck. It's a big impact. We're producing our own electricity in addition to detoxing our landfills. At the same time, we've integrated a kill strip. We don't have all of that computer electronic gear operating. We switched to the low voltage light bulbs in addition to, rather than using electricity. On one side of my office, we opened up about twelve feet of window space, and cut into cement and put windows since we have natural light. So we don't use our red lighting until it's dark. All of these combine to reducing our energy footprint and being walking to talk.
