What is Dell doing to reduce the environmental impact of its own facilities?
We are always looking for opportunities to reduce our ecological impacts. Power-saving initiatives include lighting upgrades, equipment optimization, installation of timers and sensors, and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning modifications. For example, to cool our primary data centers in central Texas — which represent about half of the company’s total power consumption — we use filtered outside air for at least some part of 150 days a year. Using this method as opposed to recirculating and re-cooling hot air generated by servers dramatically cuts our electricity consumption for cooling. Speaking of data centers, we avoided having to build a new one (thereby avoiding the multitudes of environmental impacts that would have entailed) by squeezing more capacity out of our current infrastructures through virtualization, hardware upgrades and other efficiency measures. We also have strong recycling programs inside our facilities. In FY 2010, our global manufacturing and fulfillment f
