Making friends with 'green'

An Oregon data center sparked Greenpeace's campaign against Facebook.

In the wake of a Greenpeace campaign urging Facebook to reduce its environmental impacts, the social networking giant has fired up a site detailing its environmental sustainability efforts.

The site, called Green on Facebook, launched in late October, but was highlighted as part of an announcement Thursday that Facebook has joined the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign, a coalition of trade organizations, NGOs and big-name tech companies aiming to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in the IT sector.

Among the programs Facebook touts on its new site are operational initiatives, including water conservation efforts that have reduced its water consumption by 60 percent, lighting efficiency measures and a transportation-sharing program. The company says it is also taking steps to reduce energy consumed by its data centers, including designing a new programming language that Facebook says can reduce server use by 50 percent.

At the heart of Greenpeace’s campaign against Facebook (which, not surprisingly, has a Facebook component) is a data center the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is building in Prineville, Ore. Greenpeace says the facility, which is Facebook’s first company-built data center, will be powered disproportionately by coal.

The nonprofit urged Facebook to move toward using 100 percent renewable power to run its data centers, disclose its greenhouse gas emissions and use its influence to back government policies supporting renewable energy.