How would you like your employer to hold you accountable for your carbon footprint?

WSP Group is doing just that.  The global management and consultancy service is pioneering a novel way to reduce the carbon footprint of its employees.

The scheme is the first of its kind and has been running in the UK for two years.  So far, 80 members of staff have volunteered to take part.

The Personal Carbon Tracking Scheme (PACT) helps to track the carbon footprint of employees who are each ‘allowed’ an annual carbon budget of 5.5 tonnes of emissions.

The company provides tools for employees to measure their carbon emissions every quarter.  Measures such as cycling to work, staying in the UK for holidays and using environmentally-friendly electricity providers all help employees to meet their targets.

There is a reward of £100 for staff whose carbon emissions are within their annual carbon budget and a £100 fine for staff whose carbon emissions are too high.  Most staff choose to donate their reward money (or pay their fine) to charity.  In 2008, the company was able to donate £1300 to the Woodland Trust.

WSP are now looking to expand the scheme worldwide.

More information on PACT can be found on the WSP site.

Rachel Pattisson is a freelance copy writer. She writes a blog called Really Rachel and you can hire her here: ThoughtTrains.co.uk.

(Hat tip: @LeeSimpson)

• McDonalds were named in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the fifth year straight. They take the opportunity to ponder the meaning of Socially Responsible Investing on their CSR blog Open For Discussion
• Traidcraft relaunched their online shop – we think it looks great!
• It’s official: innocent smoothies do count as two of your five-a-day
• Facebook’s PR team prove they have a sense of humour by pranking TechCrunch
• Carpet manufacturer Interface’s CEO Ray Anderson (who’s TED talk we featured back in May) has just written a book about his company’s goal of achieving total sustainability by 2020. The book is described on the described on the TED Blog as “a guide for entrepreneurs who are looking for new models of production (especially ones with environmentally friendly attitudes) in a market that’s always reinventing itself”
• Dave McClure (profile) has had a busy summer looking after the fbFund REV social incubator program:
• Seth Godin has a great little post about the importance of teaching
• It was announced on the Howies blog – Brainfood – that they are half way to getting 1 million people to watch The Do Lectures online. Why not help them out with their ambitious goal? They also laid down the rules for the first every howies raft race!
• Method (profile) score a write-up on Inhabitat. Also on Inhabitat: Skyburbs – building suburbs in the skies!
• SuperJam (profile) are offering a free jar of jam to anyone who suggests a stockist that makes an order
• Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (profile), has been judging the startups at TechCrunch50. He’s been questioning why they aren’t trying to change the world and also whether they really need to raise money to get going:
  
• Eric Ries has a great blog post about ‘The cardinal sin of community management‘
• Andrew Warner’s recent interview with Matt Mullenweg contains, among other things, a fascinating insight into business models around open source software
• TreeHugger reports that Google is aiming to halve the cost of solar power

“For Zappos, our vision remains the same: delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors. We just want to get there faster.”

- Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in a letter sent round to Zappos employees and published on the company blog.

Below is a video from Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos explaining what the deal means to him:

In theory this acquisition will give Zappos some great opportunities to learn from Amazon on the technology front and perhaps some of the Zappos company culture will rub off on Amazon in return… One thing is for sure, we’ll be watching with interest! Congratulations to all involved!

Andrew had heard that if a product listed on the Zappos website is out of stock then the customer service team will actually help you order the item from one of their competitors – they’d rather help you out in some way even if it means losing your business in the short term. Luckily for Tony the experiment worked perfectly and the customer service rep was quite prepared to help out!

You can listen to the interview here:

Previous coverage of Zappos here and here.

I just searched for previous articles about Gary on LovelyCompanies.com to link to and, to my horror, I couldn’t find any! I will definitely tell you more about this wonderful guy soon. In the meantime, if you are on Twitter, follow him now!

(Hat tip: Ryan Carson)

Last night on Twitter I think I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see. Click the screenshot on the left to see what I saw.
Here’s what it says:

JasonCalacanis: “direct @TechCrunch Mike, I told you i can’t comment on the yahoo CEO announcement yet, still finalizing my deal as ceo.”

As soon as I double checked what I’d seen, the post disappeared and it seems only two other people on Twitter picked this up: here and here. It looks like someone forgot how to send a direct (private) message and used the wrong prefix – ‘direct’ instead of ‘d’.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s previous CEO, stepped down last November adding $1.8bn to the value of the company – ouch! Now the search is on to replace him. Could Jason Calacanis be the man for the job?

Calacanis has been learning about search recently as he’s currently building his own search engine: Mahalo. Might this be an opportunity for Mahalo and Yahoo to merge in some way?

Calacanis could also be one of the “well known Silicon Valley executives” that TechCrunch says are putting together a Microsoft-backed bid for Yahoo.

And finally, TechCrunch joked that a recent SEC investigation probably ruled out Mark Cuban for the CEO post. However Cuban is an investor in Mahalo and could also be one of the Silicon Vally executives mentioned above. Could this be Cuban’s chance to get involved with Yahoo either directly or via Mahalo?

“Rather than survey a bunch of users on every decision, the Mac team decided each issue among themselves, invariably going for the option that might amuse a user the most, that would give a user the most pleasure, and therefore imbue the Mac with personality.”

Read more on TechRadar (via 37Signals).

“If they were very smart, the CEOs would drive unreleased, next-generation cars that get 100 MPG. They’d stop in a half-dozen towns along the way and invite a newspaper editorial board writer to ride shotgun for a dozen miles. They’d update their status on Twitter. They’d write a few posts for the company blog. They’d shoot video on a Flip camera and talk about how they screwed up at their first appearance, how they’re selling their fleet of corporate jets, and their plans for the future. If they behave like real people instead of CEO machines, they might arrive in D.C. backed by some pretty good word of mouth. In other words, they would prove that in these recessionary times they know what it means to be entrepreneurial, not imperial.”

From Church of the Customer Blog via 37 Signals.

Here’s some classic lovely company material (spotted this weekend on CrunchGear ).

Last Saturday T-Mobile had a ‘Customer Delight Day’. T-Mobile customers could drop in to any T-Mobile store and claim 100 free minutes or – if they brought a friend along – they could get 200 free minutes!

I assume this offer was USA only but what a lovely thing to do!
More information over on BRG.