Home of the Mean Green Screen: Yahoo!

What does it take to encourage, empower, or help an office go green?

How about a touch-screen kiosk with real-time energy usage and tools to see your individual impact? Yahoo! has unveiled the Green Screen where employees can play with data to see how much energy they could save with simple changes around the office. If successful, Yahoo! hopes to spread this power(ful) tool from the cafeteria of their Sunnyvale headquarters to their other campuses so employees can discover how easy habits, like turning off that monitor, can make a big difference.

The Green Screen is the latest initiative by Yahoo!’s volunteer Green Team that illustrates the corporation’s dedication to positive environmental change. The Internet giant has already pledged to go carbon neutral and spawned a number of green projects (complete with celebrity support), initiatives, and even a philanthropic search engine. Yahoo! Green has been the hub of their eco-friendly services since its launch in May 2007. As a computer-based Internet business, issues of energy efficiency and e-waste are their central environmental concerns. Yahoo! is well known for its philosophy that we can make a difference through corporate, employee, and consumer action. Co-founder David Filo explained the company’s commitment to walking the walk and talking the talk. He once told Collin Dunn of TreeHugger.com:

We’ve been focusing on things like energy efficiency throughout the company, whether that’s in our offices and reducing air conditioning in the summer months, or in the data centers, making our servers more energy efficient and making our cooling more energy efficient… but we’re always looking for other ideas from outside people, or inside people, on ways that as a corporation, we can reduce our footprint.

Internal efforts are compounded with efforts to get everyday people involved. Yahoo! has sponsored a number of contests for users to create icons and commercials for the company’s green services. David Filo believes that as individuals we can make a difference because even our small personal efforts add up to a big change.

“We want to convince people that either don’t know about global warming, haven’t thought about it, or aren’t convinced they can make a difference, that you can take a lot of these changes, and although it may seem insignificant at the individual level, they will add up, and we’ll see significant change from it.”

The Green Screen reflects that sentiment and the ideal that we, as individuals, can be major agents of change. Even if you can’t go carbon neutral, you can still join millions of people around the world in saving the planet. If an international corporation can do it, how hard can it be? For tips on how to take small (or large) steps towards greening your lifestyle, take a few tips from Yahoo!. You can even share your own ideas with others!