Apple : The dirtiest data company

The first question striking your head will be What is this dirty data or How and when we call data to be dirty. Lets come to that first.

While talking about environmental impact we talk about recycling habits and consumption of fuels  but what about our text messages and status updates? The energy that technology companies use storing and transmitting our data is becoming more of an environmental risk.

The way, the data-centers of these technology companies manages and stores our data, determines the energy consumed by them. "How Dirty Is Your Data?" examines the amount and type of energy consumed by several top tech companies' data centers, the massive warehouses where banks of servers store information. On this test set by environmental group Greenpeace, Apple had the worst score of 6.7% followed by HP with just 9.9%. Apple's score is largely based on its 500,000-square-foot facility coming online in Maiden, North Carolina. According to Greenpeace, that facility will consume as much energy as 80,000 homes in the United States, or nearly a quarter-million in Europe.

The top energy efficient companies were Yahoo! (55.9%) and Google (36.4%) followed by Amazon (26.8%), Microsoft (25%), Twitter (21%),Facebook (13.8%) and IBM (10.9%). While facebook has avoided being on the bottom but as per the Greenpeace report it may come down to the bottom very soon due to its high energy consumption rates.

The tech companies should look after it and their models should be employed and improved upon by other Internet(cloud computing) companies in order to save energy.