No stamp duty for carbon neutral homes, extended energy saving allowances for landlords, tax deductions for investments in energy saving machinery… the UK government is famous for its green sticks (taxes on fuels and all kinds of other things), but it also offers a range of incentives to businesses and individuals to help guide them towards greener choices.
This handy article gives an outline to some of the tax breaks available, such as the following:
8. Stamp duty land tax on carbon neutral homes
From 1 October 2007, for a 5 year period, the first sale of a carbon neutral home will be stamp duty exempt where the sale price is below £500,000. For sales at prices above that level, the SDLT charge will be reduced by £15,000.
4 Comments
Peter
There are many companies considering the planet and one of the green webhosting companies is http://www.ecoserved.com they offer quick and green webhosting with a twist they list you in their directory of sites that are running green eco friendly hosting.
It’s no excuse that it’s difficult to move hosting, you can literally set up in minutes and move your files over and you have a green webhost.
Paul
Just to add to Jason’s info here.
There have been Solar Powered Hosting solutions in the US for many years now, we at Green ISP greenisp.net offered our customers such a solution in 2003 via solardatacentres.com (but it seems this project has recently transformed into a RMI – rmi.org project, so we are no longer able to do this, we now use the aiso.net datacentre for our Solar hosting option).
Ecological hosting (who also use AISO.net in the US for this Solar solution, incidentally AISO hosted the LiveEarth website) are helping raise the awareness of such possibilities, however there are moves to get the possibilities closer to EU and UK, solar is not the only way, Hydro is overlooked in UK for example.
Also, being “green” is not simply to cancel out your “Carbon footprint” but is a philosophical, political, economic and sustainability argument, I wish the likes of Jason would refrain from “bashing” those who see the regeneration of the natural world (Strategic Planting of Trees) as something which is “bad to do”, if it is done alongside other initiatives which give an operation a more sustainable and holistic approach to doing business then I would applaud it, and anyhow, trees do absorb Co2, you must have heard of the “carbon Cycle – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle.
Anyway, keep up the good work anyone who is in any way considering people and planet in what they do.
PP.
Jason
It has been pointed out that my rant was one-sided in that I didn’t mention all other possible green hosting operations including, it must be said, those good people at http://www.green-hosting.co.uk who have a wind thang going on. Check it out.
(Also, me mate Dave has got a gerbil that he feeds with a mixture of water, protein shakes and amphetamine sulphate, so that when he’s on his exercise wheel, the energy he produces goes via an inverter to power a data centre in Slough.)
Jason
I am absolutely staggered by the lack of awareness generally about the availability of data centres that are powered by renewable energy.
All of you website owners please listen carefully… THERE ARE HOSTS WHO RUN THEIR SERVERS ON SOLAR POWER ALONE!
All of my main websites, http://www.ethical-jobs.co.uk , http://www.ethicaldirectory.co.uk , http://www.ethicalproductreview.co.uk and http://www.ethicalbiz.net (please excuse the plug) use solar powered servers so why can’t you lot?
I spoke yesterday to those shameless apologists who are running next month’s greenwash love-in at the O2, “The Sustainability Show”, and I was staggered that they were unaware that the possibility to have their website hosted in this was way was even available!
And this is the SUSTAINABILITY show??!!
They didn’t even come out with that tired old bull***t about having planted a tree.
Well, if you’ve read this far (and haven’t been put off by me shouting at you) you’re probably wondering where you can get yourself some sunshine smiling on your clean, green website.
Well it’s very simple. Just go to http://www.ecologicalhosting.com and get signed up. Do it through the website or give Jamie (head honcho, ubergeek and part-time rock drummer) a call.
For an added bonus, you also get a little gif logo saying “solar powered website” to put somewhere on your site. (That’s worth the cost of the hosting in PR value alone, surely.)
For those of you who can’t see the wood for the trees; stop thinking of excuses for why you haven’t done it and refer back to the original article by Alex Rabbetts for the reasons why you must!
Comments are closed.