Google has announced that all of its U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001and OHSAS 18001certification. For the last year, Google’s data center team has been working on a project to bring its facilities to even higher standards for environmental management and workforce safety.
The company is the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers.
On the company’s blog, Google has posted a video highlighting its efforts and the improvements it has made. “Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent," writes Joe Kava, senior director, data center construction and operations
“A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly,” Kava added.
Google’s data centers in the following U.S. locations have received this dual certification. The company plans to pursue certification in its European data centers as well.
- The Dalles, OR
- Council Bluffs, IA
- Mayes County, OK
- Lenoir, NC
- Monck’s Corner, SC
- Douglas County, GA
