Beyond Carbon Offsetting - Truly Green Hosting
There are myriad "Carbon-Neutral" web hosting companies popping up all over the web. Often, these companies are purchasing "Carbon Offset" certificates from reputable businesses in order to make up for their carbon use after the fact. More and more, this process is beginning to be seen as greenwashing.
At Taproot, we think that Carbon Offsetting is only nominally better than nothing, and we would rather be green from the beginning and not have anything to offset! It's impossible, these days, to not leave any kind of carbon footprint at all. But rather than greenwashing, we seek to do our best to minimize this wherever possible, and build ourselves ever-greener as we go.
Our servers are directly wind-powered. We do not purchase wind-power to make up for the consumption of fossil fuels -- we pay a premium to our green data center, which purchases its power directly from wind farms in Eastern Oregon. So, nothing to offset there!
Our Home Offices are powered by Clean Energy through our local power companies.
Because we do not have a physical office space, we are not using cars to commute back and forth each day, nor are we using extra resources to stock and power an unnecessary additional space.
We are a paperless office. Our business cards are 100% post-consumer waste recycled chipboard, printed with biodegradable inks.
As we grow, we will be further-greening our individual home offices (Solar power for electricity and hot water, rainwater collection, etc.) to further reduce our footprint.
While we welcome clients from anywhere, our focus for marketing and giving will be local to Portland, Oregon. We believe in supporting local economy first.
