The word “green” is tossed around a lot as a catchall term to describe sustainable or environmentally friendly projects, businesses, energy, and more. Green construction and architecture, for one, are proliferating across the world, but when it comes to gauging how “green” a building is, for example, one finds that there are more than a few standards by which to determine its efficiency and sustainability.
Enter Toronto-based Zerofootprint: A cleantech software and services company, which is leveraging competitive benchmarking between peers to help determine the “green” factor for any given building. Ron Dembo, the founder of Zerofootprint, contends that, if you want to motivate developers to improve the efficiency of a building, one can’t simply benchmark against everyone else, because each community has a different climate. Thus, the founder says that Zerofootprint aims to focus on benchmarking buildings against other buildings within a community to achieve maximum community efficiency. → Read More
Earth Day is in full swing. Have you offset your carbon emissions yet? Well, there are plenty of apps and Websites out there ready to help you do just that and more. Green is the new black. Speaking of which, if you want to be green, you’d better avoid black cars and Websites with all-black backgrounds (like goth sites and sometimes even Google).
But don’t avoid us. We just decided to turn the background of TechCrunch black today in memory of Google’s noble effort last year, when its site went black in honor of “Earth Hour”. And don’t even think about printing out an e-mail (not that you would—unless it had really important information on it that you needed hard copy of like a contract or a map, in which case, be my guest).
Seriously, green apps are great and we fully support them here at TechCrunch. The first step to dealing with a problem is often to measure it. And theer are plenty of Websites that let you measure your carbon footprint such as Co2Stats, (for Websites) and Zerofootprint (for people). But all too often these turn out to be nothing more than green vanity apps, designed to make you feel good about being green, but not really impacting the environment one way or the other. → Read More
Frankly this should just be an application on Facebook and MySpace, it would get better traction. But that’s not what the consultants told Waste Management (a $20 billion company that, well, manages waste), I’m guessing, since today they’ve launched Greenopolis, a social network for greenies.
They’re committed, they say, to connecting people and businesses on green issues, and teach people about ways to be more environmentally sound. Like other social networks, members can create profiles and add friends. Users also rack up Green Points and have a Green Profile, which shows just how much they care about the environment. → Read More
I met with Canadian startup Zerofootprint during my trip to Toronto last week for the Mesh Conference. The company, which is a non-profit, was started and funded by Ron Dembo, formerly the founder of Algorithmics Incorporated.
Their chief goal, says the company, is to raise awareness among individuals and groups that everything we consume has some impact on the environment. The company is fighting global warming in two ways: encourage carbon reduction, and sell offsets for the remainder. → Read More
