Bangalore, India — On World Environment Day this past June, Infosys announced its intention to be a carbon neutral company by 2012. It's an ambitious goal that will touch on every aspect of travel and energy use by the company's 50 facilities and 100,000-plus employees.

Infosys has had success so far with travel-reduction, green building and energy efficient initiatives, as reported by Network Computing. The company has reduced electricity use by 10 percent per capita (electricity accounts for 72 percent of Infosys' emissions) and has seen a 30 percent savings in energy use due to a number of office-related measures in place.

The company's current and future plans include:

* Build only green buildings, setting performance goals during the planning stages to encourage vendors to innovate to meet those goals.

* Maximize the use of natural light to reduce energy for lighting and use heat from sunlight to reduce energy for air conditioning.

* Use sensors to turn off lights, monitors, phones and other electronic devices when desks, offices or conference rooms are empty.

* Enforce power management settings for computers, which includes putting computers to sleep after being idle for one hour. Infosys has already done this for 50 percent of desktops in its network, and when fully in place, power management is expected to reduce desktop energy use by 20 percent.

* Minimize air conditioning in data centers; replace 200 servers with eight higher-capacity servers.

* Replace in-person conferences with teleconferencing. The company is now averaging 1,000 teleconferences a month.

* Encourage carpooling with a software system that manages carpool information, giving employees personalized information and alerts.

_{Empty office with lights on - CC BY 2.0 by Monica's Dad}