The ecological footprint left by the world's leading economic powers is overtaxing the earth as a biotope. Recent surveys have reported a factor of 4.5 for Germany. This means that Germany is overtaxing the environment 4.5 times more than can be tolerated biologically in the long-term. As a consequence, various sections of science are demanding the earlier introduction of measures to regulate environmental protection, and ease climate change. Countries and their political envoys, the UN and institutions who regulate world trade have been asked to accelerate the protracted process of creating a binding worldwide framework for an ecological world economy.

AMPEG has taken the decision to act with as much regard as possible to the environment in its business operations. In the following we provide two pointed examples of how this guideline is being put into practice on a daily basis.

Energy savings

SMEs are known for converting decisions into action quickly. This is also true of AMPEG. As far back as 2003, we introduced green PCs, which fulfilled the WEEE and RoHS environment directives that came into force respectively in 2005 and July 2006. At the beginning of 2006, a CO₂ directive for purchasing vehicles was also put into effect, which prescribed the lowest possible CO₂ consumption levels when buying company cars. An investigation into our business processes led to the setup of another project in 2007 to reduce the burden on the environment. This concerned our IT network operations.

The current situation in IT operations at AMPEG reflects a picture of a complex, productive operative network to attain premium quality in selecting and developing products and services. The structure and the operation of more than 40 servers compares more to a service company with 1000 and more PC workstations than an smaller medium-sized enterprise. In order to reduce the high power consumption resulting from operating servers continually, we made a decision at the beginning of 2007 to make as much hardware as possible virtual. The powerful processors that equip the new generation of servers were only being used in part. This meant that a RAM upgrade would suffice to operate several virtual servers on one hardware server.

The outcome: virtualising what was pretty much old hardware resulted in an average power consumption of 178 watts an hour. With a runtime of 365 days, this led to power savings of 1,559.28 kilowatts a year. As a consequence, AMPEG succeeded in reducing power consumption by 23.52% across the whole company.

Controlling at AMPEG had also been doing their sums and proposed using the power savings to migrate to a provider that generates power from 100% renewable energy. The higher price for renewable energy wiped out nearly all the savings made, which led to AMPEG saving just 5.49% in energy costs despite the considerable reduction in consumption.

Company Fleet

The discussion on pollution resulting from the worldwide increase in CO2 emissions shows that any contribution to its reduction is a welcome thing. AMPEG has reacted to this topic and introduced CO2 limits for all categories of car in its fleet. The highest permitted CO2 emission rate for "large limousines" is 190g/km. The permitted rates fall afterwards by 10 - 40g/km depending on the category of car.

Since we depend on a nationwide network of filling stations, these CO2 values can only presently be achieved in Germany by converting to diesel engines equipped with soot particle filters. This would help reduce CO2 emissions by several metric tonnes a year for several types of vehicle. The agreed values also apply to the cars driven by the Board of Directors.