The ecological footprint left by the world's leading economic powers is overtaxing the earth as a biotope. Recent surveys have reported a factor of 4.5 for Germany. This means that Germany is overtaxing the environment 4.5 times more than can be tolerated biologically in the long-term. As a consequence, various sections of science are demanding the earlier introduction of measures to regulate environmental protection, and ease climate change. Countries and their political envoys, the UN and institutions who regulate world trade have been asked to accelerate the protracted process of creating a binding worldwide framework for an ecological world economy.

AMPEG has taken the decision to act with as much regard as possible to the environment in its business operations. In the following we provide two pointed examples of how this guideline is being put into practice on a daily basis.

Climate neutralisation at AMPEG GmbH delivers surprisingly positive results

Following the implementation of measures that have contributed to the reduction of the CO2 emissions at our company, we wanted to find out how high there really are, and whether we would be able to compensate for them in future by purchasing allowances? The case study addressing how AMPEG GmbH successfully made itself climate-neutral is available here: Climate neutralisation case study .

Blog: Ecofriendly Company

AMPEG wants to lead by good example and show that climate-protection is possible. For this reason managing directors Agnes and Peter Graf, together with their children Lea Marlena and Luca Graf, have created the eco-blog "Ecofriendly Company - Suggestions for environmental protection at companies", which, with its interesting articles and examples taken from practice, is designed to encourage others to do the same. The aim of the blog is to show companies the various possibilities for making a contribution to environmental protection. You can access the blog here: www.ecofriendly-company.com/

Windows Vista and Windows 7 represent a real invitation to save electricity

The Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems allow you to administrate energy options centrally via the Policies group in the Active directory: central default settings can be used to switch workplace computers to sleep mode if they are not needed during lunch breaks, meetings or for any other reason. With a normal PC, this means a consumption of some 10 watts in standby, as opposed to 80 watts when at rest, depending on the type. The electricity saved on the monitor needs to be added to this. In standby, it consumes less than 1 watt as opposed to between 30 and more than 50 watts when in operation. If you consider that 1 kilowatt of power in the electricity mix in Germany currently means an emission of around 600g/CO2, a lot can be achieved in terms of placing a lower burden on the environment.

Instructions for administrators on how to activate a group policy and the figures feasible in practice at AMPEG you'll find at: Central Power Management Policy

Reducing paper consumption and promoting reforestation

No business can do without do without commercial stationery such as letterheads, business cards and advertising material. So, what steps can you take to reduce the burden on the environment when it comes to printed matter?

Several years ago, AMPEG stipulated printing both sides of blank paper as the default printer setting for every employee. Simply making this setting in the printer options effected a real reduction in paper consumption of up to 30 percent. Unfortunately, the letter headed paper we were using back then did not allow for printing both sides of the paper due to its design.

One aspect of the newly designed letterhead was to take this into account. The layout was designed to make double-sided printing possible. The choice of paper proved to be a problem though. The question was how to find a brand of non-coated paper that could be printed on both sides without the text showing through.

The thickness of the paper was another aspect we needed to take into account. To save on postage, we wanted to avoid using heavy paper, and our aim was to still be able to mail out two DIN A4 sheets for the price of a 55 eurocent stamp.

Working with our design agency, we managed to find a brand of paper called "PlanoArt" - an FSC-certified brilliant white paper, which, at a weight of 90 g/m², did not exceed the limits on postage we had set ourselves.

How to use short-lived datasheets effectively

AMPEG Security Lighthouse, our proprietary software application, is in a permanent state of growth as a result of the continual upgrades and add-ons we make. We add new features every month, and this makes the datasheets we print very short-lived. It is effectively impossible for us to distribute a print run of 1000 product brochures to potential customers before the information becomes outdated.

However, since product extensions do not affect the basic functionality of the application, we managed to find a solution for distributing new information to sales prospects without wasting the outdated datasheets.

We decided to print the information on the basic functionality of the application on the front of the double-sided datasheets in a large run initially. And since we have our own high-end 4-colour laser printer at AMPEG, we got the Marketing Dept. to design the contents on the reverse and then print them on demand.

The senseless waste of outdated product sheets became a thing of the past, and we are now printing according to our immediate needs.

AMPEG has imposed two new policies on printed products as a result of the measures described above:

1.) Each printed product is to be printed on both sides.
2.) The paper used must be FSC-certified.

Energy Savings

SMEs are known for converting decisions into action quickly. This is also true of AMPEG. As far back as 2003, we introduced green PCs, which fulfilled the WEEE and RoHS environment directives that came into force respectively in 2005 and July 2006. At the beginning of 2006, a CO₂ directive for purchasing vehicles was also put into effect, which prescribed the lowest possible CO₂ consumption levels when buying company cars. An investigation into our business processes led to the setup of another project in 2007 to reduce the burden on the environment. This concerned our IT network operations.

The current situation in IT operations at AMPEG reflects a picture of a complex, productive operative network to attain premium quality in selecting and developing products and services. The structure and the operation of more than 40 servers compares more to a service company with 1000 and more PC workstations than an smaller medium-sized enterprise. In order to reduce the high power consumption resulting from operating servers continually, we made a decision at the beginning of 2007 to make as much hardware as possible virtual. The powerful processors that equip the new generation of servers were only being used in part. This meant that a RAM upgrade would suffice to operate several virtual servers on one hardware server.

The outcome: virtualising what was pretty much old hardware resulted in an average power consumption of 178 watts an hour. With a runtime of 365 days, this led to power savings of 1,559.28 kilowatts a year. As a consequence, AMPEG succeeded in reducing power consumption by 23.52% across the whole company.

Controlling at AMPEG had also been doing their sums and proposed using the power savings to migrate to a provider that generates power from 100% renewable energy. The higher price for renewable energy wiped out nearly all the savings made, which led to AMPEG saving just 5.49% in energy costs despite the considerable reduction in consumption.