Green Wombat

Sustainable Silicon Valley is a coalition of tech firms and other companies that have joined local governments and agencies to work toward reducing the Valley’s greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. The organization has released a survey of what its members are doing to help employees go carbon neutral, given that in the sprawl that is Silicon Valley most people’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced driving or while at home. (Only frequent fliers who travel more than 50,000 miles a year emit more.) "To radically reduce CO2 emissions, businesses must think outside the box of the workplace," wrote Bruce Karney of KM-Experts, the consultant that conducted the survey. It asked 14 questions, ranging from whether companies encourage telecommuting to whether they offer charging stations for electric cars.

Subsidizing the purchase of a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car has increasingly become a green fringe benefit in the valley. ETM Electromatic and Hyperion (recently acquired by Oracle (ORCL) ) give workers $5,000 while Integrated Archive Systems dangles a $10,000 incentive to get employees to ditch their SUVs. Google (GOOG) uses internal social networking sites to coordinate carpools while software company Ideas offers preferred parking for hybrids. Drug developer Alza, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and PARC give employees $1 for each day they bike, walk or carpool to work. PARC – the fabled Palo Alto Research Center – also offers $100 toward a bicycle purchase and maintenance. On the home front, Santa Clara University has distributed a thousand energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs while two renewable energy companies – Akeena Solar and 3 Phases Energy – subsidize employees’ installation of solar panels.

Despite the much-publicized greening of Silicon Valley, only 25 companies bothered to respond to the survey. Big name Sustainable Silicon Valley "C02 Pledging Partners" who were no-shows include Cisco Systems (CSCO), eBay (EBAY), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle, and Sun Microsystems (SUNW).