This is a new sustainability challenge over at YouSustain that I think is really easy to do but has a decent impact: Turn off unused work computers at night.

A lot of us are pretty good about keeping our computers at home turned off when not needed, but we don’t always think about that at work. That’s mostly because we’re not the ones paying for the electricity at work. But, that electricity is still being generated by CO2-emitting means. The impact is fairly significant: if you turn off or put your computer to sleep when not at work you could reduce approximately 745kg CO2 in a year. That’s quite a lot.

I encourage everyone to join the challenge and invite their friends to do so as well. If a single person raises awareness of this issue in 5 friends, that person is directly responsible for a reduction of almost 4,500kg CO2/year, just from this. That’s about equivalent of taking a car off the road, which is a huge impact for such little effort.