Yahoo! is committed to being an environmentally responsible company, and we make constant improvements to our operations to work smarter and more efficiently.

In the past year, we made great progress in increasing our number of Green office buildings around the globe, continuing to push the industry standards for energy-efficiency in data centers, providing meaningful content to our users, and spreading grass-roots impacts through the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) and the Yahoo! Green Team.

Here is a summary of some great green things that have been happening at Yahoo!:

GREEN ON THE NETWORK
We don’t keep sustainability to ourselves!  We serve the Yahoo! community with smart lifestyle tips every day at Yahoo! Shine Green .  And, we’ve just announced an exciting partnership to promote the launch of America’s most fuel-efficient five-seat car, the Focus Electric, with “Plugged In,” Yahoo!’s first reality competition series on Yahoo! Screen.  Read more about this electrifying programming on Yodel Anecdotal.

Search Trends:

• Searches on Yahoo! for “electric vehicles” are up 2168% this month.
• Hybrid car searches are up 259% this month on Yahoo!, 59% of searches come from males
• Earth Day searches are spiking 226% this month on Yahoo! – searches for Earth Day activities are also spiking.  72% of searches come from females.

GREEN AT WORK
On the data center front, we’re proud to have the best Clean Energy Index score in Greenpeace’s report on the IT industry for the second year in a row. Our Lockport data center also won a Finalist spot in Uptime Institute’s highly competitive Green Enterprise IT annual awards.

And, last year, Yahoo! offices received LEED® Green Building Certification for our Sunnyvale, New York, and Bangalore, offices and our Omaha Data Center.  Additional third party Green Building designations have been awarded to our offices in Dublin, Milan, and Singapore.   As of today, 35% of Yahoos work in designated “green” buildings, up from 0% in 2010, and climbing quickly towards our 2014 sustainability goal of having 60% of Yahoos working in green certified offices. 

GREEN IN THE COMMUNITY
Yahoos contribute their time, talents, and treasure to environmental causes all over the globe.  Through fundraising and grant championships with the Yahoo Employee Foundation (YEF), Yahoos have contributed their own money and efforts to deliver nearly $400,000 in grants for environmental organizations. 

YAHOO! GREEN TEAM
The Yahoo! Green Team is taking action with events around the globe, including Tree-Plantings (Bangalore), E-waste Recycling (Atlanta), Free is Good Re-Use Fairs (Barcelona, Ho Chi Minh City & others) Trashcan Retirement Parties (Sunnyvale,  Beijing & others), Stair Climbing Celebrations(Taipei), Mugstock events (Omaha),  Green Speakers Breakfast (Dublin), Lights-Off Hours (Manila, Singapore, Seoul, etc.) and many more.

Happy Earth Day, from the Yahoo! Green Team!

This Earth Day, online searches suggest the three R’s are taking a back seat to more revolutionary technology as searches this month on Yahoo! Green for “recycling” are down 56% and 93% compared to the same period in 2010 and 2009, respectively. And it seems the recent nuclear crisis in Japan has caused consumers to look into safer alternative energy sources, as searches on Yahoo! Green this month are up 208% for “solar energy” and up 1,307% for “wind power.” Interestingly, more men are showing more interest, as 3-out-of-5 searches this month for both “wind power” and “solar energy are by males, especially in Illinois, Ohio, Texas and New Jersey.

Searches on Yahoo! this year for “organic food” have decreased 44% when compared to the same time period in 2010, but there is an upswing this month as searches spike 8%. Organic foods seem to have become more mainstream as 44% of searches for them this month are by consumers with an average income of $25K and below. Additionally, it’s not just women who are interested, as 1-out-of-3 “organic foods” searches are by males.

Alternative energy and green living aren’t the only hot topics as retailers give away products and coupons this April 22nd. Yahoo! Green has a list of the top Green related freebies to help you celebrate Earth Day, some of which include:

• A free brewed coffee or tea when you bring in a reusable mug on April 22 at participating Starbucks stores
• A free full-size face cleanser from Origins when you bring one of your empty skin-care bottles to their trade-in program on Earth Day
• A free organic milkshake from Evos on Earth Day. The healthy-fast food chain has locations in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina
• A free reusable shopping bag from the Disney Store when you trade in five disposable plastic bags for recycling
• Free admission into all 394 U.S. national parks now through Sunday, April 24.
• A 60% discount on green and natural products at drugstore.com through April 22.
• Discounts on eco-friendly kids’ books from Barnes & Noble.
• A discount of up to 40% on Green Hotels on Travelocity.

Of course, your green deeds shouldn’t just be limited to Earth Day. To help find ways to make your world and the world a safer and more sustainable to live in, check out Yahoo! Green, and don’t forget to become a part of our community on Facebook and Twitter!

As a founding member of the GreenXchange, Yahoo! is collaborating with Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Nike and nGenera to create a web-based marketplace for sharing intellectual property which is intended to lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Businesses are in a unique position to use collaboration and open innovation as powerful tools for combating climate change.  The goal is to accelerate the learning curve for energy efficiency and sustainable business practices by making patented technologies for research and licensing available, in a manner that’s good for our individual businesses and the planet.

As an active participant, Yahoo! is planning to license patented technologies that we have developed to improve performance and increase efficiency in our data centers around the world.  Today, the members of the GreenXchange are hosting a CEO breakfast at WEF.  We are calling on other corporations to join the GlobalXchange commitment to fast track the development of innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.

The GreenXChange is part of Yahoo!’s 360 degree approach to advancing sustainability through internal commitments to drive change in cooperation with other institutions (including the Department of Energy) and work collaboratively with other influencers setting sustainability as a priority.

David Dibble, EVP of Service Engineering & Operations, Yahoo! Inc.

• Flickr groupies: If you’re a Flickr user who loves to share and share alike, you’ll dig the new groups feature that just debuted. Now when you visit any group, you’ll see an “Add Photos” link that launches a new tool that lets you add up to 6 photos or videos at a time from your photostream, your sets, tagged items, geo-tagged items, items uploaded on a specific date, etc. It makes it a whole lot easier to participate in groups that float your boat — whether you’re into photos of Utrecht, spiderwebs, backpacking the Northwest, polydactyl cats, or altered street signs.
• Opening your address book: Personal information geeks just scored big time. We’ve released the API for Yahoo! Address Book. What, you’re not schooled in browser-based authentication? Well, let’s just say the developer world is going to have a lot of fun building useful products and features for you by gaining authorized access to Yahoo! Address Books. Imagine taking your Address Book with you whenever you shop for gifts online. Or confidently allowing a third-party social network site to make it easy for you to send invitations to your contacts. Or being able to look up phone numbers for mobile applications. We can’t wait to see what those developers come up with.
• My (green) Yahoo!: With oil reaching an historic $140 a barrel, who doesn’t want to become obsessed with greener alternatives? Time to populate My Yahoo! with pertinent goods. The Hybrid Cars module lets you stay on top of all things Prius, plugin hybrid, and beyond. And the green-travel module from Yahoo! Groups lets you keep tab on tips from other environ-enthusiasts. It’s good for you, it’s good for the Earth.

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On Tuesday, I watched Jerry Yang and his wife Akiko Yamazaki speak in the sunny main atrium of the Yang and Yamazaki Energy and Environment Center at Stanford University. The newly dedicated building will house scholars whose mission is to solve difficult environmental problems. Jerry and Akiko contributed $50 million toward the construction of this state-of-the-art, day lit building that represents the cutting edge of sustainable design. Made with recycled steel and other green materials, the building will use an estimated 56% less energy and 90% less water than comparable non-green buildings.

The building also encourages collaboration, an especially critical feature when you consider the diverse disciplines it will require to tackle problems such as climate change and growing water shortages. People are more likely to write papers or conduct research together if they regularly bump into one other in the hallway. The open floor plans at Yahoo! are based on the same principle of open communication. Jerry and Aikiko’s building brings professors from a staggering range of departments together with students in a building that is green, beautiful and invites interaction and cross-pollination.

Y2E2 reflects green design at the most thoughtful level: low impact in its initial construction and ongoing operations; consideration for the health and productivity of the students and faculty who will spend their time within its walls; and a place that will encourage playful, unconventional, creative thinking that is the hallmark of Silicon Valley at its best. It’s also exactly the sort of living and thinking that that has to happen in order to solve some of the planet’s most pressing challenges.

Standing in the building’s atrium that evening, surrounded by a cross-section of scholars, business people, students, and other greenies, I was reminded why Yahoo! is so committed to the environment and energy efficiency. The guy at the top obviously cares quite a bit about this stuff, too.

Here’s a video of the dedication.

Chris Page
Director of Climate and Energy Strategy