Carbon Neutral Website

Recognising the need for action, in October 2010 Farrell Heyworth's website became carbon neutral

Farrell Heyworth has, for the last twenty years, championed the Estate Agency industry through a combination of innovation and forward thinking. As a responsible Estate Agent, we have recognised the need to develop carbon efficient solutions to reduce our environmental impact.

Paul Morgan, Farrell Heyworth's IT Director, said "Selling a house uses a lot of energy and resource, for example, newspaper adverts, high quality printed brochures, a web presence on portals and on our own site, proactive marketing like email alerts and letter drops. As a progressive Estate Agency, Farrell Heyworth wanted to find ways to reduce our use of energy without reducing the quality of our service to our customers."

"We identified that our web data centre, which is necessary for housing servers and providing web & email services to our 20 branch network, uses a large amount of energy and emits tonnes of CO2 every year. In fact, data centres worldwide are expected to generate 533 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020 (Carbon Trust)."

In October 2010 Farrell Heyworth's website became carbon neutral by offsetting the annual carbon footprint of the web data centre, including all devices and daily operational power consumption. Farrell Heyworth offset the energy consumed in the web data centre by contributing to a number of hydropower renewable energy schemes, which reduce greenhouse gas emissions by displacing power from higher-emission fossil fuel sources on the regional electric grid.

Paul Morgan continued, "We decided to address our energy use by powering our servers using hydro energy, a renewable energy source that directly offsets the operating emissions from servers and devices, and massively reduces the CO2 output from the web data centre. Hydro power, which diverts only a small portion of a river's flow to generate electricity, was our first choice because it significantly reduces the social and environmental impact of energy generation when compared to traditional hydroelectric dams."

"Our service reduces the impact on the environment of selling and renting property and does not cost the customer anything, which is a great responsible service."

Your Estate Agent shouldn't contribute to your carbon footprint. Farrell Heyworth can help you take steps to become carbon neutral. After all, this isn't the kind of mark you (and we) want to leave on the world.