About

Trade Me is New Zealand's largest eCommerce company, and runs the Trade Me, Travelbug,
Old Friends and Find Someone websites. With over 1.9 million members, Trade Me is New Zealand's most visited website. Through online auctions alone, kiwis buy, sell and reuse over 6 million used items every year, reducing waste to landfill and saving the energy and resources required to produce new items. Trade Me became neutral and carboNZero certified in April 2008 through Landcare Research's carboNZero programme and is further reducing its environmental footprint by supporting and promoting reuse and recycling, and a wide range of other environmental initiatives. Trade Me also helped establish carbon trading in New Zealand by facilitating the first public trades of carbon credits in September 2007. In April 2008 Trade Me facilitated the first trade of Kyoto credits in New Zealand. On World Environment Day 2008, Trade Me is launching a new partnership with the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society of New Zealand to help protect kiwi in New Zealand.

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Strategy

GHG Emissions Management and Reduction Plan
This Plan sets out how Trade Me plans to manage its carbon emissions in 2008. While Trade Me is continuing to grow as an organisation, in staff, services, and in its overall membership base, it is also committed to reducing its emissions intensity.

Main emissions sources

Trade Me’s main sources of emissions are the electricity required to run data servers (37%), business-related air travel and office electricity. The rest is made up of fuel use by owned vehicles and business taxi travel.

Data Servers

Trade Me has made and continues to make a range of significant technological changes to increase efficiency and reduce the power consumption required to serve the Trade Me website and internal network systems.

These include:

Virtualisation, which hides the physical characteristics of our server environment and allows for multiple “virtual” servers to run on a reduced number of physical servers. This enables applications to run more efficiently over fewer physical servers than would otherwise be required
Blade Servers, which sees high density servers residing with an enclosure and sharing common hardware such as power supplies, media devises and network interfaces, and thereby reduce power use and overall cooling requirements;
Refreshing hardware according to energy efficient guidelines including those adopted from the Ministry for the Environment’s ICT equipment sourcing guidelines; and
Consolidation of servers whereby reducing the number of physical servers required to run applications.

Trade Me has experienced considerable growth in the nine years since it began. For example, in 2000, Trade Me had 20,152 unique visitors a month, 6046 auctions per month, and 8496 registered users. Today (March, 2008) Trade Me has 3,877,222 unique visitors per month, 4,473,408 auctions, and 1,910,658 members. This growth is expected to continue during 2008. However, Trade Me will plan its infrastructure development to ensure that power consumption growth is less than proportional to growth in capacity

Business-related Air Travel

Business-related travel is another significant source of emissions, making up a third of Trade Me’s overall emissions.

With staff numbers growing, this will probably increase. However, Trade Me has already begun to address this by:

setting up an Auckland office in August 2007, and employing a person in Christchurch.
installed a video-conferencing facility in both the Wellington and Auckland offices which, along with teleconferencing, is used frequently for internal and external meetings.
Electricity

Another significant source of emissions is Trade Me’s office electricity use. Trade Me’s staff has grown considerably, more than doubling in the past two years, and continues to grow. Therefore, Trade Me’s office electricity use is also expected to grow. However, through efficient use of existing space, and other measures, Trade Me aims to reduce electricity intensity per person.

Lighting: We already have very energy efficient lighting, which includes some motion sensor lighting. In addition we:

have recently made changes to the circuits in our Wellington office so we only need to turn on the lights in the areas where people are working. This is important now that we have 24/7 customer services staff.
remind staff to turn off lights in rooms and other parts of the floor when not in use.
Equipment: Our PC’s are all configured to powersave mode as a default, and most people turn off PC’s when they go home. A recent platform server upgrade and decommissioning of the old one means our server is now more powerful and more energy efficient.

We consider energy efficiency when upgrading other equipment.

Other Business-related Travel

Another source of emissions, although significantly less than air travel, is taxi, hire car travel and for our owned vehicles. Trade Me has experienced considerable recent growth in staff numbers. There has been a related increase in vehicle travel.

This growth is expected to continue in 2008, but Trade Me is taking the following steps to manage vehicle travel:

When going to external meetings, staff consider walking where it’s practical to do so instead of taking taxis or driving;Considering fuel efficiency if buying new vehicles;Considering using taxi companies that are taking steps to reduce and offset their carbon footprint;Investigating the use of Fuel cards to assist with measuring and monitoring fuel usage;
More video/teleconferencing rather than face to face meetings;
We have also purchased a bicycle, and non-motorised scooters for staff to use when they want, and will encourage staff to use them more.

Other emissions sources and environmental issues

In addition to managing and reducing emissions that fall within the scope of Trade Me’s carbon footprint measurement, Trade Me is taking a number of other steps to manage and reduce its emissions and overall environmental footprint. Some of these are detailed below.

Commuting

We are working with staff to improve our commuter footprint. In particular:

We recently sent staff a survey to find out what our staff commuter footprint is and what we could do to reduce it;We’re encouraging staff to consider walking, cycling, taking a bus or train, or car pooling to work;We provide parking for motor-scooters, motorbikes and bikes at work, but not for cars.Waste and recycling

Trade Me keeps most documents electronically and does not own a photocopier. We have co-mingled (glass, plastics, cans and aluminium), paper and cardboard recycling in place. We already sell most reusable items (like our old couches and hardware) on Trade Me and recycle toner cartridges.

More recently we have also:

• installed more paper recycling bins in the Wellington office;
• installed a scanner so that document copies are made and sent electronically.

We also encourage staff to:

• Only print as required
• Use the double-sided and other efficient printing options where possible
• Recycle paper by putting it in the blue bin for shredding.

Engaging with Trade Me members

Trade Me has over 1.9 million members, and around 453,710 people visit the site each day, and spend about 18 minutes per session. During 2007 Trade Me members traded over 6 million second-hand items on the site.

Through engaging with Trade Me members, we can promote and encourage them to adopt environmental initiatives. Examples of things we are doing include:

Promoting World Environment Day, Bikewise Week, Earth Hour, e-Day and other environmental events on the site and in newsletters
Developed an Environment page to help our members reduce their environmental impacts, including how to safely dispose of non-saleable electronic waste, and setting PCs to powersave mode.
Added an Environment Forum to the message boards where members can discuss environmental issues.Made vehicle fuel efficiency information available on Trade Me Motors and our New Cars website.
Facilitating and promoting carbon credit trading on the site.
Partnering with the Royal Forest and Bird protection Society of New Zealand to protect our native bird, the kiwi.

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