Apple needs to close the door on global warming

Walking past Apple Computer's flagship store in George Street Sydney on Friday, I was hit by an uncomfortable blast of icy air. The doors to the store had been left open and refrigerated air was flowing out and into the very hot street. Apart from making it unpleasant for passers-by this is wasting energy and contributing to global warming. Apple's Sydney store has a similar design to Apple's Fifth Avenue Store in New York, about which similar energy use concerns have been raised. Apple needs to provide doors on its store to keep the air in. Otherwise this detracts from Apple's good record on energy saving.

Keeping the air in while welcoming customers can be difficult. This can be a problem in older buildings as well as new. Yesterday I noticed one solution at the National Innovation Centre, at the Australian Technology Park while at "Startup BarCamp Sydney". This building was part of the historic Eveleigh Railway Workshops. The building has large brick arched entrance, which could not be made airtight on the outside without detracting from the historic look of the building. Instead the a large glass wall has been built inside the entrance. From the outside the glass is not noticeable.

Apple could consider this approach building a glass box inside the doors of its store (which in itself is a large glass box). The inner wall created could have self closing or revolving doors.

While smaller historic buildings could not afford the space that ATP and Apple have, they could consider a similar approach by leaving the wood door open and using a modern glass one to close the entrance for air-conditioning, while retaining an open look for customers. There are detailed guides to making historic buildings energy efficient.

Google Sydney Green Office

On Friday I had a tour of Google's new Sydney office. This was before talking at the Sydney Linux User's Group meeting on "Learning to lower costs and carbon emissions with ICT". Here are some impressions on the building, offices and particularly on green aspects.

The Google Sydney office is a remarkably modest building for a high profile multinational company. It is so modest I had difficulty finding the building. It is a simple glass box across the road from the gaudy Sydney casino, facing the harbour. The outside the entrance there is space for parking a few dozen bicycles. This is an excellent design element: simply and practically showcasing the building's green credentials.

Inside there is a similarly understated foyer leading out to a glass roofed atrium. The only obvious signs of sustainable design as vertical large air-conditioning ducts rising up through the atrium.

One point about the building is that while Google have the naming rights, they are not the only tenant. This caused confusion at reception. I gave my name and was asked "what organisation". It turned out I was being asked what organisation I was visiting, despite the fact that next to the reception desk is a very large sign saying "Google".

As well as lifts, the building has a set of buterfully finised wooden stairs in the atrium, which should be useful in encouraging staff to walk between floors, instead of using the lift.

The Google reception is several floor up in the building. The reception desk is backed by a living wall, with plants in a hydroponic matrix. This has a Google sign in rusty steel. The effect is very striking and apparently many people photograph it (this being an area of the building where photography is permitted). But the wall requires very bright lights to keep the plants alive. This makes the setup unsustainable in energy terms, wasting electricity. The bright lights also make it hard to see the receptionist. Google should relocate this and other living walls in the building to the northern side, where they can take advantage of natural sunlight.

Next to reception are several meeting rooms. These have automatic lights which turn on when occupied and off afterwards. The automatic lights work well, unlike some offices I have visited. The meeting rooms are themed in a playful way, at best these are unobtrusive, but some are silly and inconvenient. One room has a meeting table, lamps and chairs attached upside down on the ceiling. It cannot make for a comfortable atmosphere under these, even if they are securely attached. Another room has the table attached by ropes from the ceiling, so that it wobbles when bumped. These are interesting, but failed, experiments which should be carefully documented and then replaced with a conventional fitout.

Google uses a conventional floor plan with open plan offices for most staff and some meeting rooms at the core of the building. This leaves most windows and views open for staff to enjoy. This is a good arrangement. There appears to be limited external shading on the building and it is likely that any desk located within a few metres of the northern glass would be uncomfortable for much of the day. This might be a good location for some other functions. Also relocating the living walls to the north face would help with shading, as well as giving the plants natural light.

Some of the ceiling has been covered with shade cloth, apparently in an attempt to create an outdoor atmosphere. However, about all this does is to waste energy by having the ceiling lights blocked by shade cloth. This material should be removed and, if necessary, replaced by thinner light transmitting gauze. It is ironic that shade cloth is used on the ceiling where it is not needed, whereas there is little shading on the northern windows, where it would be of use.

The open plan office areas are generously proportioned, with more than the usual amount of space for each employee. There are low cloth covered partitions attached to the modular furniture to provide some sound abatement, without obscuring lines of sight when standing. Technical staff have very large (30 inch?) LCD monitors, while sales and marketing staff have smaller screens. Many staff have two screens. It would be more energy efficient to give staff one large screen than two smaller ones.

The screens and computers of unoccupied desks seemed to be switched off indicating either automated power saving or a well trained workforce. This contrasts with the office of a well known media company visible out the window seemed to have entire unoccupied floors with rows of hundreds of powered up screens wasting energy.

The building employs a perforated metal ceiling, design to allow free flow of air from the cavity, where chilled water is employed. Harbour water is used to chill water for building air conditioning.

The Google meeting room proved to be a disappointment, with a tiny lectern inconveniently located in the corner of the room up against the door. The room is equipped for old fashioned video recording and video conference. This makes it inconvenient to use for modern computer based presentations.

The meeting room lectern is mounted on a small raised platform, which is unsafe. The platform does not extend beyond the lectern. As a result I stepped off the platform and lost my balance almost hitting my head on the nearby door. Google should extend the platform, or rebuild the whole lectern.

Apart from offices and meeting rooms, Google has staff kitchens, games rooms and a canteen. These seemed remarkably similar in design and fit out of the Microsoft Cambridge Research Center in the UK. These are generously equipped for staff who tend to work long and unusual hours. The Google canteen has very good harbour views and is particularly well equipped.

Overall the Google offices avoid the excesses which might be expected of a hi-tech very successful global company. The commitment to corporate social responsibility is evident without being ostentatious. Some of the excessive exuberance of the interior designers needs to be corrected and the meeting room fit out made functional and safe.

Sharing Printers to Reduce Energy

The students in my Green ICT course just completed their first assignment on estimating the greenhouse gas emissions from ICT in the organisations where they work. What stuck me was how much energy the average office uses. As an example, I found an estimate that a office worker causes about 1,078 kg-CO₂/person/year in Japan and 2,470 kg-CO₂/person/year in the USA.The students came up with comparable figures for Australia. One way to reduce this is to have more sharing of resources. This can be sharing of equipment (such as fewer printers).

The conventional wisdom now is to have offices equipped with fewer small printers and more larger "multifunction" devices. The MFDs look like photocopiers, but function as a copier, printer and fax machine. The problem with this is that the devices purchased tend to be over sized, thus resulting in more energy and paper use. Also the MFDs have a higher standby energy consumption, due to their multi-function and multi user nature.

The staff at the Department of the Environment and Heritage used 30 sheets of paper per person per day in 2004. That seems a lot of paper, hopefully it is someone more like 3 sheets a day by now, but assuming it is correct, how many printers are needed? The Fuji Xerox DocuCentre 1055 is one of the low volume laser MFDs (such unites cost less than US$500). It prints at 15 ipm (Images Per Minute). Assuming the staff at Environment are printing their pages double sided, that is 2 images per page, or 60 images per person per day. Assuming a 5 hour day, the 1055 can print 2250 pages a day, enough for 75 staff.

The building 1 Molonglo Drive in the Brindabella Business Park in Canberra is offering floors of 2,586m2. The NSW Government aims for a fit out of 15m2 per person, resulting in 172 on a floor in Molonglo Drive. At 75 staff per printer, this would result in only 2 printers per floor.

Clearly some departments have the larger MFDs. The ApeosPort-III, as there are documents scanned in with such a unit on the web. At 25 ipm, this unit could service 125 staff. Having two of these devices per floor would be excessive, but having only one printer would be operationally difficult.

The five floors of 1 Molonglo Drive have space for about 856 staff. The building might have two larger printers, such as the HP Laserjet 9040N at one point in the building and four smaller devices on each floor. The devices on each floor need not be "multi-function". It may be much cheaper and more energy efficient to have separate scanners and printers.

One option would be to procure low cost MFDs (less than AU$100) with ink jet printers, but not equip these with any ink, so they are just used as scanners and fax sending devices. The printing would be done on separate dedicated devices. Inkjet printers use far less energy in standby than laser print devices.

Techniques to discourage staff from printing could be used, which would also reduce the capital cost of the equipment. As an example most of the devices could be not fitted with automatic staplers or collating devices. This would discourage the staff from printing multiple copies of multi-page documents. It would also greatly reduce the cost of the printers and maintenance.

All documents printed, scanned or faxed could be automatically retained in the organisation's electronic document management system. All documents printed could include a machine readable code, which would be automatically read and matched in the electronic document system. An electronic notice would be sent to the staff member responsible for printing or scanning a document, requiring them to link it to the appropriate electronic file. This would make the point to staff that they should send electronic, not paper documents, where possible and also remind them that the printers are for business not personal use.