Today in the United States is Earth Day. Founded by US politician Gaylord Nelson in the late 1960s, Earth Day is celebrated in many countries each year on April 22 to promote awareness of critical environmental issues. Recent surveys have shown that video conferencing and other types of teleconferencing are among the most effective methods of reducing a company’s carbon footprint. Today is an important day in the conferencing industry.

As part of an ongoing effort to protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions, WebEx has partnered with Carbonfund.org and has announced a tree planting program. Just sign up for a free trial of the WebEx software, conduct 2 online meetings with at least 2 people each, and WebEx will plant a tree in your name. For every 100 trees that are planted in people’s names, they will plant an additional 100 trees.

WebEx and Carbonfund.org help companies work greener. Together we raise understanding of how business travel impacts the environment—and how to minimize this impact with web conferencing. We also plant trees to help offset existing carbon emissions from travel.

So how much carbon emissions can be saved by replacing teleconferencing with traditional traveling?

• Teleconference instead of flying from New York to London for a team meeting. Save 2,690 pounds of carbon dioxide.
• Enable two salespeople to give a presentation via teleconference rather than traveling from Chicago to Silicon Valley. Save 4,696 pounds of carbon dioxide.
• Train 12 employees using video conferencing instead of flying them to San Francisco from Dallas. Save 22,377 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Today, Genesys, a multimedia online collaboration service, released its annual Earth Day survey, pulsing 18,000 customers on environmental issues and concerns in the workplace. This year’s survey showed an increase in attention to environment consciousness and an overall increase in virtual meetings since last year’s survey.

The most effective Green behaviors are those that provide benefits to the people doing them as well as to the environment,” said Denise Persson, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Genesys. “Virtual meetings that take place by phone and web conference really started as part of a movement to save costs both in dollars and environmental pollution, and reduced travel continues to be one of the biggest impacts we can make on our environment. But now, people have embraced virtual meetings as a way to manage work and personal life more on their own terms, mixing work and play in a way previous generations never imagined.

Virtual Meetings on the Rise

• 87% or respondents indicated that their company now uses phone or web conferencing when communicating to employees offsite.

• 60% of respondents said they’d rather participate in a phone or web conference while they were on vacation, rather then missing the meeting altogether and not having their opinions voiced.

Environmental Consciousness in the Workplace

• 56% of respondents believe that their company understands and has taken an initiative towards being more conscious of the environment in the workplace since last Earth Day.

• 62% of respondents indicated that their company has modified company policy to reduce business travel.