[CONTEST CLOSED] Happy Earth Day!

[MeredithW]

UPDATE: this contest has ended. We really enjoyed reading everyone's innovative ways to save the planet, so thanks for all of your submissions! Our randomly selected winners are: @peterk, @ROCTEL, and @Dieghitoo77. Congrats!   

It’s Earth Day! In the spirit of raising awareness about sustainability, we want to learn how your organization is using Meraki (or technology in general) to reduce your carbon footprint. 

This could be through using port scheduling to reduce the energy used by your stack itself, or it could be a bit more out of the box like using smart cameras to detect movement that indicates a machine was left on erroneously. For additional ideas on leveraging technology to save power consumption, have a listen to @merakisimon's  Unboxed episode about sustainability! 

The key is, for this contest, we'd like you to describe, via any desired mediums (text, video, images, interpretive dance, etc.), how your org uses technology to help reduce your carbon footprint. All comments will be entered to win one of three H2Go Bali borosilicate glass bottles with threaded bamboo lids:

How to Win

In a comment on this post, submit your earth-conscious company initiatives that are based in technology. Submit your entry on this blog post before 11 a.m. PDT on Friday, April 29th (04/29/2022). We’ll then draw three at random to win a Meraki water bottle! Your entries will be public and visible throughout the contest.

Terms & conditions

• Limit one entry per community member.
• Submission period: Friday, April 22nd, 2022 at 10am PDT through Friday, April 29th, 2022 at 10:59am PDT
• Prize will be a selection of Meraki swag with value not exceeding USD 50.00
• Official terms, conditions, and eligibility information

[Inderdeep]

Happy Earth Day to all, Go Green, Less waste, Recycle, Reused, use renewable sources and grow more trees. 

Good Luck to all !

[Luca_]

Happy Earth Day to al of you!!!!

Good luck!!!

With Meraki you can!!!

All togheter promise with the Earth!!!

[Jalees]

Happy Earth Day to everyone..!! Save water🌊, Plant a tree🌲, recycle and spread love ❤️. Make this planet greener healthier and good place to live. 🌍

[Vic]

Happy Earth Day!  We are using people counter/monitoring solutions to identify if any resources may be on a particular floor or area, that way we can turn off lighting and HVAC.  

[germandariovega]

Feliz día de la tierra!

[KarstenI]

With one customer we started to switch off all switch ports that are not essential while non-working-time. This includes the ports pointing to the APs. Because the later gives alarms in the dashboard, we will likely migrate this to the deep power save mode that is now available via the API.

All in all we save over 10 MWh per year.

And I was choosing text as I had no idea how to dance this ... 😉

[Dion]

We  are looking to install solar panels and also car charging stations.

[Maydinli]

Our BT Group Manifesto outlines our commitment to be net zero by 2030, as well as committing to help our customers save 60m tCO2e (tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) by 2030.

[yepper]

🌏Happy Earth Day 🌏 as well! We utilize monitoring solutions to reduce energy usage such as motion activated lights to turn off when no one is in area and refreshing our computing resources to lower power solutions.

[Jon_A]

Happy Earth Day! We have migrated from old energy hog of equipment to newer equipment that uses less electricity at all of our Offices.

[Bettencourt]

Happy Earth Day 2022, let there be ice.

I use IOT devices and Apple Home Kit to efficiently control my environment.

[carlosastorga]

Happy Earth Day go green. I think two big ideas are; Smart houses and buildings: Both the home and the workplace consume a lot of energy. Technology is changing all of this, downplaying it a lot, thanks to new devices like thermostats and smart lights that dim uniquely when needed. The other is Renewable Energies: the well-known clean energy is getting more and more and it is also much more efficient. Its design is both more attractive and accessible to facilitate this change for the good of the natural environment.

[RJones]

Happy Earth Day! I noticed on our return to office that we have trash, recycle and now compost bins (for food waste) in our break areas. We do that at home, so it's great to see it happening in a corporate environment.

[Sascia]

Happy Earth Day ! ! !  😎

[SVCommuServices]

Happy Earth Day!

Sunnyvale Community Services is a non-profit food bank and financial assistance center. We recently renovated and moved into a new building, where we leverage technology to try and run the building as efficiently as possible. We use technology to manage the lights on a schedule and with sensors, our HVAC systems have a central control which allows us to dial in efficiency and our network ports used for wireless turn off after business hours to save a little more power. We also have Zoom rooms for our caseworkers/clients, all of which turn off at night and over the weekend.

A larger project we are working towards is getting funding to redo our roof. It wasn't done during the main portion of the construction, but when we do, it'll be to the best green standard and with solar panels to help offset the cost of our freezer and cooler.

Thank you!

[MerryAki]

Happy Earth Day 🌍 🌎 🌏 

our company has certain initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases to run a more sustainable business.

For instance we got a business unit that deals with CSR topics. Our emissions are monitored and we track down the emissions to certain things like travel activities, but also office spaces and equipment.

Thats quite complicated, but I enjoy to be a part of both teams (IT&CSR)

Certain measures we developed:

Donating old devices for charity 

Green electricity

Alternative travel plans / train, car, plane compared with the corresponding emission.

So this was a small experience from my/our company.

Hope that there are similar approaches in other companies aswell.

[LENIN]

En nuestra empresa nosotros usamos siempre tecnologia 👨‍💻 de cisco meraki, tanto en telefonía como en switches y elementos de red, los puertos poe para los telefonos y computadoras de noche se desactivan y ahorran energía tanto en los switches como para los equipos conectados a ellos, teléfonos, computadoras de escritorio, laptops, aún mejor todos tenemos por norma apagar nuestros equipos 💻 y nadie deja encendidos sus equipos fuera del horario de trabajo 👨‍💼👩‍💼 y todos dejamos guardados nuestros equipos y apagados dentro de nuestros cajones del escritorio ✨, además de que las luces y aires acondicionados se mantienen apagados fuera de horario de oficina, y obviamente a todos nos obsequiaron recipientes reusables para el café y agua así que nunca usamos desechables, tenemos programas de reciclaje y tenemos en varios puntos de la oficina tres tipos de botes de deshecho para separar la basura y reciclar, las tapas de refrescos y botellas de pet se reciclan y se proveen a una planta recicladora externa, tenemos un solo planeta, y lo debemos cuidar, feliz día de la tierra 🌳🌲.

In our company we always use cisco meraki ‌👨‍💻‌ technology, both in telephony and switches and network elements, the poe ports for telephones and computers are deactivated at night and save energy both in the switches and for the equipment connected to them, telephones, desktop computers, laptops, even better we all have a rule to turn off our computers ‌💻‌ and no one leaves their computers on outside of working hours ‌👨‍💼‌‌👩‍💼‌ and we all leave them stored our computers and turned off inside our desk drawers ‌✨‌, plus the lights and air conditioners are kept off outside of office hours, and obviously we all got free reusable containers for coffee and water so we never use disposable, we have recycling programs and we have in various points of the office three types of waste bins to separate the garbage and recycle, The drink caps and pet bottles are recycled and supplied to an external recycling plant, We have only one planet, and we must take care of it, happy earth day ‌🌳‌‌🌲‌.

[PhilipDAth]

Not on purpose or through planning, but our office has pretty much become a "lights out" facility.  We are now working from home 99% of the time.  I think this is going to be permanent.  The lights are left off.  The heat pump has been turned off.  The fridge has been emptied and turned off.  Staff are no longer driving to and from work every day.

We setup an area for couriers to do deliveries to, and we set up an MV to monitor it.  When we get a delivery we get a motion notification, so someone knows to go in and collect what is waiting or to process it in the office and then go back home again.  I'm thinking it might be good to get a Meraki MT30 button for couriers to press when they do a delivery to trigger a more deliberate notification.  I tried to get an MT30 previously, but I couldn't order one.  I think they are available for order now.

We setup an MV72X and use Plate Recognizer to record pictures and number plates of all vehicles coming into our office car park - to provide greater security now that no one is regularly at our office.  We got a waiver from our insurance company, and they said that the above motion capture and plate recognition are sufficient, so we no longer have to have alarm monitoring or guard response (so no more guards driving to our office and doing checks anymore, etc).

We also got the MT20 door sensors.  Now whenever someone enters our office we get a nice MV picture to match.

We setup an MT12 to measure water leaks.  We had a problem in the past when we switched off the fridge and didn't give proper consideration to what would happen to the ice in the freezer, so now that won't happen again.  We setup one under our kitchen sink as well, as we have had a pipe burst in the past, and without anyone there anymore, it could make a massive mess before it is discovered.  Imagine a burst pipe being left to run for a week at a time.

[Rajveer_Saggu]

Living car free.

working from home.
Using  Poe switches

smart home gadgets which can control lights, air conditioning etc

all have major impact on reducing carbon footprint 

[van604]

we gave all staff a transit card, if they left their cars at home, 

turned off the AC 2 hours before EOD and swapped out to LED lights in every other bank of light so less bright

[dropfreeze]

We installed automated lighting and Cisco Webex Desk Hubs to create a hot desk environment, eliminating 50% of office space and reducing energy consumption by 67%

[张起东]

One world one dream; Promote the harmonious coexistence between man and nature；Happy Earth Day!🎖🇨🇳

[npnitin]

Earlier we have use a analog sensors for measuring temperature and humidity in Foundry. Which some time showing wrong result due to that processing material would be futile.

Then we have shifted to Cisco Industrial Asset Vision Sensors like AV201 and Cisco IXM gateway.

Now we got a real time data of temperature and humidity through the dashboard which resulted in increasing productivity.

[SAMHINDI]

our company (https://syber-technology.com) is based in Beirut, Lebanon, with  the huge chaos now happening in terms of power shortage, we had to switch to solar energy to apply multi layer of power sources just to stay online, after inserting a power scale into our server room, we managed to fine tune our energy expenditure and diminished our carbon foot print.

since our convention of the CSR for corporate, we have engaged in a green CSR program with our partner https://lri-lb.org to plant seedlings in the name of our company and preserve them for a better chance to survive.

yep I look happy !

[Neonetx]

Happy planet earth day

we installed light automation in offices to save energy

A clean earth is a happy earth!

Think green, keep it clean

Reuse & recycle, save our planet, think green

Clean up the earth, it’s the only home we have

[DarrenOC]

I personally like the way Meraki package their products as nearly all of it is recyclable. Some work to be done to remove the foam from your bulky items however….

As others have already mentioned using schedules on ports to turn them on/off when offices aren’t occupied.

[Dieghitoo77]

Happy planet earth day

my company use solar panels to produce energy and buy energy only from sustainable sources. 

in our office, we haven't food distribution and for the coffee break, we use only the recyclable pods and cups or the ceramic cubs.

[SRehman]

Happy EARTH DAY Indeed TO ALL OF YOU!

Please make the best use of the things around you. 

• Less food and other waste
• Try to Plant Tress
• Conserve water around you.
• Environmentally responsible.
• Green construction.
• Green Public Transportation.
• Support Local industry products
• Travel more to discover green environment.

[AryiMa]

1、recycle old network devices with a low discount or a bit cash depreciation when buying new devices

2、setup responsibility policy in the office who is the latest one leaving office will be responsible for close the water and turn off the power

3、Paper recycling and real-name registration system

[Mohit_Dhanjal]

Happy Earth Day to all! We are working in Green Energy Projects. 

Focusing on Solar Energy and Planting more trees in one of our initiative.

[Jagatiya143]

1. Encouraging of work-life balance culture which allows employees to work from home (WFH). Cisco Meraki products help to achieve work-life balance culture. WFH reduces transport use which in turn reduces carbon foot print on a global scale.
2. Reduces energy usage through the use of heat sensors in server rooms and data centers which can automatically maintain temperature and cut usage of air con.
3. Use of sensor lights and sensor taps in offices which can help to reduce water and electricity consumption.
4. Usage of mobile devices in the offices which allows far less consumption of electricity, as well as allowing employees to be mobile and meet and greet clients with a sense of socializing with the clients, at the comfort of the clients, and offering business and services at the door steps of the clients.
5. Recycle IT equipment as well as packaging materials which allows the reduction of carbon foot print.
6. Encouraging the green community by rewards.
7. Configuring power saving mode policy on devices which allows energy consumption to be reduced.  
8. Usage of renewable green energy sources such as solar panel technology.
9. Designing the upcoming IT equipment to minimize the usage of electricity by innovation.
10. Establishing data centers in cold regions to reduce usage of air con which in turn results in less air and water pollution. 

[almightythor]

we use Meraki to monitor smart irrigation sensors at a large sod farm to control all irrigation which reduced water usage by 30%

[AnilPatil]

We have introduced Smartdose,this Smartdose amounts to 65% less Plastic.

[MarcP]

We started to use MT sensors in our DCs and already changed our settings for our air-conditioning, as we saw it was often too cold most of the times. Absolutely useless before. 😉

Company planted hundrets of trees regarding to amands of building new buildings (everyone employee is owning a tree now)

Also, we really started to turn of lights when, even at daytime in some areas if no one is there 😄

EDIT: Already saw some ideas which I will do as well, like power off ports in the night when they are not needed to be turned on, great!

[MathiasFR]

Hello community,

To save energy, we are using port schedule (I rename it for the occasion) on all our POE switches so we turn off our Wifi access-point 4h a day between 1AM and 5AM.
Nobody ever ask us to turn them ON during those hours.

We are managing more than 800 access points in 35 buildings so yes, the effect is not that bad !

I let you calculate the energy saved but 15Watts (in low power mode) * 800+ AP * 4H * 365 days is not that bad with this really simple trick.

Hope it inspires some of you

Mathias C. for Morning, France

[SSAY-AXS]

Happy Earth Day to al of you and Good luck.

Power OFF Coffee Machine 

[KarstenI]

@SSAY-AXS "Power OFF Coffee Machine":

But be aware of the fatal consequences for productivity this could have ... 😉 

[AhmedIsmail]

Happy Earth Day ! ! !

[ROCTEL]

Happy EarthDay - At ROCTEL we have policy to reuse, recycle and reduce plastic consumption where we can. We also planting trees in Ireland, now into our third year we are on target to planting 10,000 indigenous trees this will mean over 10,000 ton carbon sump will naturally be created over the coming 40years and 12x that over the life of the trees, we are using technology to communicate, document and monitor our progress. see our blog  

[Dustin_R]

Happy Earth Day!
At Shaw, our leadership team made the decision this year to keep several teams working from home - Covid or not.   This has resulted in less pollution due to employees not having to commute, less power being consumed to keep large buildings heated and lighted as well as less waste from consumables in the office. 
Let's all do our part to help preserve the planet for future generations.

[asmosteve]

We enable power saving options wherever possible, and actively decommission older/unused equipment.

[BlakeRichardson]

We rolled out follow me print last year, the month of February for example saw a drop of CO2 of 120 kilograms and a reduction in over 14,000 less sheets of paper printed compared to last year.

We also have a nursery that plants seedlings to rehabilitate areas in the city and surrounding areas. 

One area we are also investigating is renewable energy sources i.e. solar and how we can incorporate this into our facilities. 

[BeintheNOW]

Happy Earth Day! 

At home we recycle plastic bottles!

Cheers!

[rogue7860]

Happy Earth Day!!

We have solar at work and re-cycle water

[SSAY-AXS]

The Cloud is Green <==> Meraki is Green

[Pagu]

Dear our mother Earth friends!!! We try to raise awareness of the reduction in the use of fossil coal sources by replacing travel with the adoption of telepresence with Cisco - Meraki technologies.

Save water, Plant a tree, recycle and spread love. Make this planet greener healthier and good place to live.

Paolo

[ivankenley19]

Happy Earth Day to all! Meraki product is so efficient and convenient. Since Meraki dashboard thus not need to have a physical controller, we optimize energy efficiently. Lesser physical equipment, more power savings 🙂

[ViniciusFranca]

Happy Earth Day to everyone!

Encouraging and providing means for your employees to help the environment by reducing the protection of consumption of resources such as water and electricity is a good thing for everyone: it benefits the business and the image of a brand, and also protects the environment.

Thanks!

[EdsonReiter]

With recycling we live in a better world

[giovanitestoni]

Happy Earth Day to all!

We are instaling solar panel on all our branches.

[YacirMouline]

I would love to get meraki used at work. Sadly not.

But I reacted and installed a meraki network at home with branches and i love monitor family uses to the best with footprint savings.

Happy Earth Day and let save our planet !

[SSAY-AXS]

@roger779 

HED (Happy Earth Day)

[SSAY-AXS]

@rogue7860 

HED (Happy Earth Day)

[peterk]

Happy Earth Day !

Were getting Electrical Cars for our Fleet - yes generating Electricity isnt clean in all Sources but we hope and support Energy is getting more Green

[Anupam_Grover]

Happy Earth Day! Working from home and using Meraki Firewall, switches and Access Points. Also, installed automated lights, so using smart gadgets to control lights and AC to reduce energy bills and CO2 emissions.

[antlac1-cr]

We are going paperless as much as possible by rolling out printer management software to better understand what is being printed and how we can reduce that down as much as possible. 

[angelsanchez]

Hello, Thank you for this contest and initiative! In our company we use Meraki MV camera to detect an average of our office occupation hours, then based on this data we schedule power saving plans on non critical systems, We have manage to save up to 40% of energy with this initiative 🙂

[Suar]

Happy Earth Day !

we moved with one of my customers to a paper free office. and in some weeks is the next customer is moving to paper free office

[efrodge]

We take all old technology for ewaste from our school community.  Another initiative is developing process to become as paperless as possible.

[Sean_Monty]

Hello,

Happy earth day, we have taken a initiative to move away from our own company owned data center premises to a commercial Carbon Neutral data center. This will dramatically reduce our company carbon footprint.

[shamsuddin]

Happy earth day

Lets go Meraki, Work from home save the fuel and obviously Money too , have efficient network. 

[wvmtneer]

In a very simple way, using Meraki products has cut down on travel required by our IT staff to install or replace equipment in our branches scattered across the US.

[francktls]

In my company, the "Let it Bee" program has been created to install beehives on the roof of our buildings and distribute honey to the employees.

[ekramer]

We are upgrading our old Cisco catalyst switches to smaller, less power-hungry Meraki switches.

[AltaVistaSchool]

Used toner cartridges are recycled so that they do not end up in the local landfill.  Old electronics are sent out to e-waste facilities.

[Berkeleycowboy]

We are migrating our data centers to AWS to reduce power and heat.  

[estoril]

We are removing over 200 servers globally to consolidate into regional cloud data centers. This is being driven by an effort to lower our total IT power consumption by 60% by 2025.

[MichelleH]

Dentro de nuestro corporativo hacemos practicas constantes para ayudar a nuestro planeta.
Procuramos gastar solo la energia necesaria para cuidar nuestro planeta.
Ademas de que todos los materiales que se pueen reutilizar son destinados para que se les de un mejor uso!

[Del_Bancroft]

This isn't a company-based carbon footprint Earthday event, but more of a group cleaning up the environment for Earthday. So, most likely will not qualify, but a good plug for other Earthday events where people can help.

     My Jeep group, working with the Michigan DNR and a couple of other small groups removed 15.91 Tons of trash (three 30 cubic yard dumpsters or equivalent to 270 pick-up truckloads) plus 208 discarded tires (taken to a recycler) from the forest in Michigan's northern lower peninsula. Also, we picked up over three 55 gal trash cans of returnable bottles and cans.  This was our 4th year of doing this cleanup and it's 100% volunteer.  
    Michigan Adopt-A-Forest program has an interactive map of dumpsites (https://midnr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=d2b92259b1e04b0e8b52680f942e0d1f) where you can clean up a site or report a site when out enjoying the outdoors.   The yellow dots are sites we cleaned up along with the trails in an area of over 100 square miles.   

[Jim_Decker]

Our company, ACI Solutions, transfers its paperwork into electronic media to reduce hard copy printouts and unnecessary shuffling of papers among the internal offices.  We send as much outgoing correspondence as we can via electronic mail over our Cisco-based network to minimize impacts to our forests!  As a result, we have been able to reduce our annual print requirements by reams and reams of paper!

[MeredithW]

UPDATE: this contest has ended. We really enjoyed reading everyone's innovative ways to save the planet, so thanks for all of your submissions! Our randomly selected winners are: @peterk, @ROCTEL, and @Dieghitoo77. Congrats!