Friday Green Numbers round-up 10/08/2010

Green Numbers
Photo credit: tiffa130 @ flickr

And here are this week’s Green Numbers:

  • “The Timberland Company (NYSE: TBL) believes it can help alleviate hunger, create jobs, protect wildlife and preserve the environment…all through the simple act of planting a tree. Make that five million trees – in five years.

    It’s a bold pledge in support of a bold vision. And although the notion is pretty simple – plant some trees, do some good in the world – Timberland’s global reforestation program recognizes that success doesn’t come quite as easily as that.

    “You can’t just throw a sapling in the ground and expect the world to change,” said Timberland President & CEO Jeff Swartz. “But done thoughtfully and strategically, with committed partners, planting trees really can lead to meaningful long-term solutions to a whole host of environmental, social and economic problems.” “

  • Plans to build three new factories to make thousands of giant offshore wind turbines that would create an estimated 60,000 jobs are set to become the latest casualty of the spending review, it has emerged.
    The previous government had pledged £60m to upgrade ports, mainly in the north-east, to enable them to handle the next generation of giant turbines for installation off the UK coast.

    Siemens and General Electric have announced plans to invest £180m in two new manufacturing facilities in the UK, but say this is conditional on the necessary work on nearby ports. Mitsubishi is also interested in building a third factory.

    But the Guardian has learned that the competition inviting ports to bid for the funds is likely to be scrapped

  • Still quite lightweight, Microsoft have finally, with their 2010 corporate citizenship report, produced a report following the GRI reporting guidelines.

    Hopefully this is the beginning of proper CR reporting from Microsoft.

  • According to a new SEC filing, Rhode Island startup GreenBytes Inc. added $3.5 million to the series A round they raised last year, led by Battery Ventures and initially consisted of $7.5 million.

    GreenBytes provides “energy-efficient, inline deduplication storage appliances.” In plainer English, the company makes hardware and software that IT operations teams use to store and protect huge amounts of data, and to control how much energy they must use to do so. GreenBytes claims its technology can cut storage power consumption by 50%.

  • Major corporations can save millions of dollars with simple energy efficiency tweaks–if they know where to look. That’s where the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program can help. The three year-old program plays host to 51 MBA students that are sent to 47 corporations to dig up energy savings.

    This year’s group found $350 million in net operational cost savings at companies including Bloomberg, eBay, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Target, Verizon, and Xerox. So how did they do it?

  • Eurostar has today announced a planned £700m investment in its rolling stock that will result in the rail operator running some of the greenest trains on the planet from 2014…