Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Earth
Stop All
Deliveries on
Earth Project
Shreyes Balebail
February 27 th 2018
2
Table of Contents
Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Issues with current mail delivery system ................................................................................................... 3
Proposal to solve mail delivery system ..................................................................................................... 3
Outcome of fixes ........................................................................................................................................ 3
Background .................................................................................................................................................. 4
Problem ......................................................................................................................................................... 5
Environmental Costs ................................................................................................................................. 5
Financial Costs .......................................................................................................................................... 7
Customer Satisfaction Issues .................................................................................................................... 8
Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 19
Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 20
Executive Summary
Google1 has been dedicated to innovating and advancing our society while being
as environmentally friendly as possible.
The Stop All Deliveries on Earth Project, or S.A.D. Earth for short, is a proposal
designed to reduce waste from delivery, and eventually to eliminate all forms of
business to consumer delivery.
Annually, we as a company and as a world are expelling hundreds of millions of
pounds of seemingly unnecessary carbon dioxide from delivering and replacing
products for our customers. We hope to fix this.
Outcome of fixes
1. Less carbon dioxide emissions released from Google services
2. Higher revenue from Google Stores and Data Centers
3. Greater brand recognition and awareness
This proposal is intended to be a proof of concept that this endeavor is possible and
hopefully a start for us to update other services we currently offer to emit less pollutants
and waste.
1Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Our goal is to be able to deliver any type of information to any person anywhere in the world at any time of day.
4
Background
Recent research has proven that the global demand for resources was
equivalent to 1.5 times what Earth can support in one year. At our current rate, we are
using much more resources than what Earth can replace in the same time frame.
Google believes that we should be moving towards a "circular economy," which
means that instead of using raw resources like timber and ore to make new products
and items, we should instead be rescuing the materials already used multiple times
before we use brand new materials. To achieve the goal of using the same material
multiple times, we will have to maintain, reuse, refurbish, and recycle the materials to
make sure that the quality and efficiency is up to our standards.
As Google grows bigger and spreads farther, the scale of our operations and the
number of our customers grows with us. This is why I propose for us to rethink our
current delivery system and develop it from a completely different point of view since the
current system is no longer sustainable to use due to how many products we are
selling.
Our current process for delivering products that customers have purchased is not
sustainable in environmental and financial terms.
5
Problem
Currently, for a customer to be able to get a
Google product it must be delivered to them. If we
speak in terms of the number of sales of the Google
Pixel in 2017 alone, we sold 4,000,000 units. The
majority of these phones were bought online, meaning
we shipped the phone all over country to each
individual customer.
Most of our shipment fulfillment centers are
currently in Texas; regardless if someone buys a phone
from Texas, Kansas, or even as far away as Maine or
California, the phone will always be shipped from
Texas.
Environmental Costs
Let us take, for example, that we live the Silicon Valley want to buy a Google
Pixel. To get it delivered from the fulfillment center in Texas is about a 1,575 mile plane
flight to and from the closest airports. On average, shipping one pound of a package
one mile emits about 1.31 pounds of carbon dioxide. We sold 4,000,000 Google Pixel
phones in 2017. Each package weighed about 5 pounds, totaling about 20,000,000
pounds of total deliveries. This is about 26,200,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from
delivering the phones to the customers alone.
Along with people replacing their phones because of cracked screens, the
Google Pixel 2 had screen burn in retention issues causing about half of the sold
phones to be returned and replaced — resulting in about 2,000,000 units being
replaced. The process we currently have for repairs and replacements for us to ship the
customer with the defective phone a temporary phone while they ship us the defective
phone. This way the customer will not be out of a phone while we repair the phone.
Once we have fixed the phone, we ship back the repaired phone while they mail back
the temporary phone.
This results in about four delivery exchanges per person, totaling about
8,000,000 deliveries in replacements alone. If we do the same math as we did for the
original deliveries, the total weight of all the packages is totals to about 40,000,000
pounds. This emits about 52,400,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from delivery planes
and trucks.
6
From the total deliveries of Google Pixel phones alone in 2017, we released a
total of 78,600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. While we only contributed about 0.788%
of carbon dioxide to the total 10,000,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide released
annually from the shipments of our phones in 2017, that if we take this number into
perspective it is about 78,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide we are responsible for.
Taken into perspective, a single tree can absorb about 48 pounds of carbon
dioxide a year. It would take a single tree 1,641,667 years to absorb the amount of
carbon dioxide we waste from delivering our phones. It is literally impossible to sustain
this amount of emissions and keep Earth at the current level of carbon dioxide.
7
The 78,800,000 pounds of carbon dioxide does not include the emissions from
other products of our lineup. We sell multiples SKUs of smart speakers, laptops, Wi-Fi
systems, VR products, casting devices, home temperature devices, security devices,
and multiple accessories for each of these devices.
The total amount of carbon dioxide that we emitted in 2017 alone was
6,393,405,603 pounds. While this number takes into account of all of Google’s uses like
servers, Google Maps vehicles, Google Music and everything else, it is an extremely
scary number that we can start to reduce.
While the deliveries aspect of Google account for a fraction of the 6,393,405,603
pounds of carbon dioxide we output every year, it is still a place to start and a great
place for us to test this as a proof of concept to learn ways for us to scale this plan
throughout our company.
Financial Costs
Not only are there environmental reasons why we should not ship products as
much, there are also financial reasons. With our current business shipping plan, we are
charged about five dollars for every package that gets shipped, regardless if our
customer ships it to us or we ship to our customer.
As we calculated before, it is about 4,000,000 packages for the initial sales for
the phones and about 8,000,000 packages for the replacements for the phones in 2017.
This totals to 12,000,000 deliveries and equates to around $60,000,000 in shipping
phones in 2017, once again excluding the rest of the product lineup we offer.
8
Besides an outlier spike in 2016, our customer services satisfaction rating has
consistently been going down for the past few years and will go down at an even
greater rate if we continue to grow our physical product portion of our company without
making drastic and necessary changes.
9
Project Description
My proposal, in short, is to open Google Stores. Just as there are Apple Stores
and Microsoft Stores, I believe that Google Stores will solve parts of all the issues we
have been encountering.
We have proven that we already know how to set up, furnish, and run a store
because we have done it in the past but in a smaller scale. We had two temporary
popup stores, that were set up and furnished better than some permanent stores, in Los
Angeles, CA and New York, NY for three months at the end of 2017. These stores were
a huge success, bringing brand awareness and even sales that would have not
happened had customers not had a physical space to visit and try out products.
I propose that we open stores in the top ten populated cities in America:
1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. Huston
5. Phoenix
6. Philadelphia
7. San Antonio
8. San Diego
9. Dallas
10. San Jose
These stores could act as local hotspots for all things Google related and allow
people to come into the store for issues rather than being frustrated over the phone or
online.
10
Servers
Google currently has twelve data centers that are working 24/7 doing everything
from streaming millions of hours of YouTube to consumers to distributing emails to over
a billion daily Gmail users.
Server Efficiency
Google data center uses
50% less energy than average
data center around the world.
This means that they use
approximately half of the
electricity that other data centers
would use for the same amount
of work.
This is made possible by
constantly upgrading and
optimizing the hardware and
software of these data centers.
In fact, we get about 3.5 times
the computing power per watt of
electricity used as compared to
what we got in 2015.
Along with using less electricity, Google also diverted 86% of waste from global
data center operations away from landfills in 2017. Currently six out of twelve of
Google’s data centers have achieves a 100% diversion of waste from landfill. In other
words, Google was able to put 86% of waste that normally would be thrown away into
landfills, into compost, recycle, and even just reuse the ‘waste.’ This waste includes the
massive amounts of water that keep the servers from overheating to the food and sewer
waste the staff members who maintain the servers create.
Waymo, one of Google’s subsidiaries, had partnered with Lyft in 2017 doing
something very similar. Google provided Lyft with the cloud computing, machine
learning, artificial intelligence, and math computing to run the software for the self-
driving car Lyft was developing. All Lyft had to provide was the camera and sensors for
the vehicle and the vehicle. Google’s data centers would compile all the data and
manage everything else.
There are many reasons why companies would be interested in this service
offered by Google. The main reasons are because most companies are not financially
secure enough to invest the huge down payment about $1,000,000,000 to build a new
data center up to Google’s standards. The initial cost is more than some customers may
even be worth, thus making it not financially affordable or logical to devote such a great
amount of money.
Another reason
companies would utilize this
service is because most
companies simply do not
have the real estate to
house such big data centers
or the ability to run them.
Many companies do not
have the knowledge or
resources to manage,
update, and maintain such
complex data centers —
moreover who to hire to
perform such specialized
and complicated tasks.
13
The biggest reason why companies would rather use our data centers rather
than start their own is how efficient ours are. We have been in the data center business
for nearly two decades now and we have learned how to manage and optimize the
resources and machines to use as little input to generate the most output. It would take
years for new competitors to have as advanced of a method as we currently do.
By using our data centers, companies would save nearly 65-85% in carbon
emissions and energy costs from using their own data centers. Currently our overhead
energy use in our data centers makes up only 12% of our entire energy use. This is an
incredibly small number considering the sheer number of users who refer to these data
centers for Google searches, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Music, and all the
other countless services we offer.
Financing Servers
Based on other cloud computing services offered from other companies on a
much smaller scale, I predict that we would be able to charge about $10,000,000 per
year per company — obviously altering the number based on the needs of each
individual company.
While it may seem like a massive amount at first, it is not a ridiculous amount
compared to the $1,000,000,000 it costs to build a brand new data center. By having
just ten customers for this service, we would be able to fund all ten proof of concept
Google Stores, a very easy and realistic goal.
14
Store Revenue
Along with generating revenue via selling our data center services, we will also
be making money from the Google Stores we set up. When people are walking in malls
or driving in cities they will be forced to walk and drive past Google Stores, creating
more brand awareness and possibly even influence their next purchase.
Customers
will now be able to
walk into a store and
make impulse buys
on products from
something small like
a cheap phone case
or something as big
as a new laptop.
This is a
much easier route of
sale compared to
the old method of
only technologically
savvy consumers
finding the official
online Google store
website to purchase
products.
People will be exposed to the variety of Google products that have been
unknown and unheard of until they venture into a Google Store.
If we consider the bare minimum of a single Google Store selling only one phone
for $700 and a laptop for $1,300 we would be making $2,000 at the least. This equates
to about $14,000 a week or $728,000 a year. Not only will this pay for the ten full time
sales associates and repair people we hire at a $70,000 annual salary, but we will be
making profit on it.
It is important to note that it is highly unlikely that we sell only one of these each
of these products a day as the demand is already much higher and will grow as the
brand awareness increases due to the visibility of the Google Stores.
15
Made to Stick
Proposed initiative based on the “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas” developed by Chip
Heath and Dan Heath.
Cost Analysis
Carbon Dioxide Cost Analysis
Total CO2 Emitted for Pixel Phone Original Deliveries 26,200,000 pounds
Total CO2 Emitted for Pixel Phone Original Deliveries 26,200,000 pounds
Total CO2 Emitted for Pixel Phone Repair/Replacement
52,400,000 pounds
Deliveries
Total CO2 Emitted for Total Pixel Phone Deliveries 78,600,000 pounds
Emissions
Using this estimate, the number of Pixel phone deliveries should drop from
12,000,000 to about 3,600,000 deliveries.
This means that our carbon dioxide footprint for the delivery of Pixel phones in
the following years should drop from 78,800,000 pounds to about 23,640,000 pounds of
carbon dioxide.
Financial
Lastly, I believe that our revenue will be growing at an even faster rate than
before for our products. Because we opened physical stores for people to walk into and
purchase things without second thoughts, we expect to have a higher number of orders
and higher number of products sold per person.
We will also be gaining additional revenue from selling our data center services
to companies who would not have access to as efficient data centers otherwise.
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Conclusion
The Stop All Deliveries on Earth Project is designed to improve upon our current
services in an attempt to reduce our waste, stop unnecessary spending, and also
increase our revenue and customer satisfaction from alternate services. Not only will we
be saving our Earth and environment, but we will be able to do so while being beneficial
to our business and society around us.
We hope that through this endeavor, we will be able to make a change in our
world for the better. Though this is just a small change in our company, and an even
smaller change in the world, we do believe that it is fully worth it and this serves as a
good position to start a global change and also serves as a model for other companies
to follow to be more environmentally efficient.
Our belief is that we will be able to learn from this venture and even improve on it
for future projects to make sure that our company as a whole is being as efficient as
possible for the sake of our planet.
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Appendix
To: Google Environmental Product Development Team
From: Shreyes Balebail, Project Analyst
Date: February 27th, 2018
Subject: Stop All Deliveries on Earth Project Commencement Notice
Thank you,
Shreyes Balebail
21
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