Yahoo asks you to go green

Yahoo is urging its 500m users to make their lives greener

Yahoo is urging you to go green with a new online climate campaign that asks users to take their environmental responsibility more seriously. The Yahoo Green campaign aims to encourage millions of people to take basic steps to help the environment.

Yahoo Green is an online education programme. It gives you the latest environmental news, consumer tips and suggests ways to become personally and socially active in combating global warming.

The Yahoo Green website lets you choose from a menu of actions to reduce your personal carbon emissions. And it shows you the collective impact of everyone who participates. It asks users to change light bulbs, take public transport, reuse shopping bags, properly inflate tires, recycle and more.

Global campaign

The campaign launched in the US yesterday. But it'll be expanded to Europe and other international markets throughout the year, Yahoo said.

Last month Yahoo said it would become 'carbon neutral' by the end of this year. The company uses renewable power, hydroelectric energy and passive cooling to reduce energy use in its huge data centres, which host some 100,000 server computers.

It has already replaced incandescent light bulbs on Yahoo marketing billboards with energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights.

"What is the biggest way for us to have an impact? The biggest way by far is to get this message out to half a billion people," Yahoo co-founder David Filo said.

"We want to make it easy for consumers to do something as well as help them build enduring habits that can truly make a difference. We believe many small individual actions can add up to significant change," Filo added.