A round-up of business news, including Facebook, McDonald's and Renewable Energy Systems.
Facebook has announced plans to build what is says will be one of the world’s most advanced, efficient and sustainable data storage facilities in Ireland. All the racks, servers and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source. The site, at Clonee in County Meath, will be powered by 100% renewable energy.
French company Sagemcom is to test BT’s Better Future Supplier Forum’s sustainability assessor tool with the aim of rolling it out to other suppliers. The tool is a seven-step process that asks the supplier a series of simple questions about the company’s sustainability measures. The answers are assessed and a comparison made with previously identified best practice case studies. It also provides recommendations on how the supplier can improve its business practices. Sagemcom makes the BT Homehub.
McDonald’s is trialling a scheme that enables its paper cups to be recycled and returned to the supply chain. The fast-food chain is working with British papermaker James Cropper on the pilot. Used cups from 150 McDonald’s outlets will be collected by Simply Cups, the UK’s only paper cup recovery and recycling scheme, and sent for reprocessing at James Cropper’s reclaimed fibre plant in Kendal, Cumbria. Paper cups constitute about 30% of McDonald’s packaging waste. If the pilot is successful the company will roll out the scheme to its 1,250 UK outlets.
Renewable Energy Systems (RES) is to build its first UK battery energy storage system in Somerset. The Hertfordshire-based company, which has pioneered energy storage in the US and Canada, has signed contract with Western Power Distribution (WPD). The 300kVA/640kWh storage system will be installed alongside a 1.5MW solar park near Glastonbury and connect to WPD’s south west network. The project will investigate the technical and commercial feasibility of battery energy storage combined within distributed generation installations in the UK.
