Sun Microsystems (the people behind the popular program language JAVA) have launched a new community-based website where companies and organizations can calculate, compare, and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. OpenEco.org is free and open to all organizations. The only cost of admission is sharing data, transparently or anonymously, with other community participants.

It is an interesting idea. It will allow companies to calculate how much GHG they are producing from things like buildings, and car fleets, and then compare them with other companies. Sort of like confessing your carbon sins, and then asking for help in order to rectify them.

Having free and open GHG calculators that are useful to big companies and organizations has the potential to save these companies a lot of money. Increasingly, GHG analysis is done with home-grown or proprietary tools, and often requires significant internal resources or expensive consulting services. With OpenEco.org, carbon accounting data that might ordinarily remain in a company’s spreadsheet can be easily shared using the site’s calculators. The tool enables organizations of all kinds to benchmark against one another, set realistic reduction goals and share best practices to meet them.

"Working together drives progress faster than working alone" said Dave Douglas, Vice President of Eco Responsibility at Sun Microsystems. Prior to launching OpenEco.org, Sun began sharing its own emissions data and best practices online to help other companies reduce their footprint as well. Sun also posts case studies and best practices about how it has greened its own datacenters worldwide.

A visit to the site doesn’t currently show much activity, but it did only launch a couple of days ago. I will be very interested to see if this sort of free and open sharing of GHG emission data will take off. If your company is particularly bad about GHG emissions, do you really want the world to know that? I guess if you were truly interested in reducing that level, then showing the world how much you have improved might be a good thing. Either way, the fact that places like this site are being built at all show a forward thinking and positive outlook.