Green

Greenwash (a portmanteau of green and whitewash) is a term used to describe the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, such as by presenting cost cuts as reductions in use of resources. It is a deceptive use of green PR or green marketing. The term green sheen has similarly been used to describe organizations that attempt to show that they are adopting practices beneficial to the environment.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash

We do not advertise our company to be "green." We do try our best to reduce the impact our business has on the environment. Below is a list of environmentally-aware practices we follow today:

• Our service model - Flat Rate IT is and will continue to be a remote (phone & internet) engagement model. We support our clients with this model 100%. There is no reason for a regular on-site support visit with today's technologies. This model keeps our engineers and their cars, off the road and most importantly - it keeps our clients happy.
• Free, environmentally-responsible recycling of computers, monitors, printers for clients. Any time we replace a piece of equipment at our client's location, we offer them free recycling (and optional certified destruction of the hard drive). We also have several non-profit clients and in some cases older equipment can be re-purposed and used in their environment - of course only if the client agrees to the donation.
• We use 100% recycled office supplies whenever possible
• Our letterhead and business cards are printed on 100% recycled stock with soy ink
• We offer to match a client's donation to environmental initiatives available when purchasing new computers (ie. Dell's plant a tree program)
• We encourage our clients to purchase energy saving equipment
• When appropriate, we utilize server virtualization to save on energy costs and reduce the cost of deploying new hardware

Things we are working on:

• We have tested and will be rolling out to our clients power management software that will allow them to power down PCs when not in use - but still have it be available for remote access should they need to do some work remotely.
• Working with our office building's property management company to institute a recycling program for all the tenants (We do recycle - but have to take all the material off site to our homes each week. Please don't tell the city of Boston or Cambridge)
• Continually researching new products and services that can be used to help both CMIT and our clients reduce our impact on the environment

We will continue to update this page as we make progress and come up with new ways to support our clients, while at the same time making the process a little more earth-friendly.