Staring at the many impressive glass and steel corporate headquarters that line the Sandton landscape, visitors to South Africa’s foremost commercial hub could be forgiven for thinking that environmental concerns are perhaps not top of the agenda. Energy efficiency has become the order of the day at iBurst with the forward thinking broadband service provider reducing its carbon footprint through the initiatives of an elite squad of eco-warriors.
Their ‘Simply Green’ team has switched off one third of the building’s lights during the day while implementing an almost total switch off during the night.
Not only is the ‘De-lighted’ project saving energy, the temperature off all geysers within the building has also been lowered by eight degrees Celsius. Since iBursts participation in Earth Hour in March, their motto has been: recycle, reduce, respect, re-think and re-use, whenever and where ever possible.
iBurst aims to bring constant awareness to their employees through educational seminars and the invention of R.O.S.E. which stands for ‘Reduce your plastic, Only buy products which display the environmentally friendly logo, Stop throwing your plastics into the bin, Expect nothing in return but a better future for your descendants.’
Cars have stabbed earth in the heart
Some iBurst employees have stepped up to reducing their own carbon footprint. Steve Briggs, iBurst’s head of commercial operations, rides an electric-powered Eezi-Bike to work. His take on cars is that they are ‘one of the most impractical and wasteful things ever invented and the internal combustion engine has literally stabbed the earth in the heart.’
Although he does drive occasionally he maintains that he tries to use the Eezi-Bike as much as possible. Explaining his decision to opt for an electric-powered bike, Steve said that his interest in cycling combined with his desire to do positive things for the planet made the Eezi-Bike the natural choice.
‘Future generations are going to pay the price of what we do today so we should be thoughtful enough to consider the kind of world they will have to live in and take small steps to ensure it is a good and healthy world,’ he added.
Steve uses his electric bike to commute between iBurst‘s Sandton offices and his home in Parkview, an approximately 10 kilometre trip that takes him around half an hour to complete. The drawback of the bicycle is that it only has a top speed of 30km per hour. However it allows the rider to zip in and out of traffic, get fit (as the dynamo requires the rider to slowly pedal) and get home at roughly the same time as the guy in the gas-guzzler.
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