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S.A.D.

Earth

Stop All
Deliveries on
Earth Project

Shreyes Balebail

February 27 th 2018
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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

Project Description ...................................................................................................................................... 9


Outcomes from Google Store .................................................................................................................. 10
Servers .................................................................................................................................................... 11
Server Efficiency ...................................................................................................................................... 11
Data Center Plan ..................................................................................................................................... 11
Store Revenue ......................................................................................................................................... 14

Made to Stick .............................................................................................................................................. 15

Cost Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 16


Carbon Dioxide Cost Analysis ................................................................................................................. 16
Google Store Cost Analysis..................................................................................................................... 17
Data Center Cost Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 17

Assessment - How Will the Impact be Measured ................................................................................... 18


Deliveries ................................................................................................................................................. 18
Emissions ................................................................................................................................................ 18
Customer Service Rating......................................................................................................................... 18
Financial .................................................................................................................................................. 18

Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 19

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 20

Work Cited .................................................................................................................................................. 21


3

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.

Issues with current mail delivery system


1. Carbon dioxide and packaging waste
2. Costly and not time efficient
3. Low customer satisfaction
This three part plan was developed to overhaul these issues, and to be self-sufficient
and independent of other Google services in an attempt to not disrupt current parts of
Google.

Proposal to solve mail delivery system


1. Open Google Stores
2. Limit mail deliveries
3. Sell cloud computing services to customers
If this proposal is carried out, not only will this update not cost money, but we will be
able to generate more revenue based on the new products and services we will be able
to offer.

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

Customer Satisfaction Issues


Besides environmental and financial issues, we also have encountered customer
services issues. At times packages get lost, misplaced, or even damaged resulting in
packages being delayed. Packages can be delivered even later than 30 days of the
original shipping date. Due to packages being lost, customers are often charged for a
package that was lost at no fault of their own. Even after waiting for over 30 days, at
times the repaired phone they are given does not work so customers are required to go
through the entire delivery process a second time to get a functioning product.
We have been able to scale up our manufacturing and product engineering at a
very high rate, but as you see we sadly have not been able to scale our customer
service at such a rate. Since all our customer service is done via phone or online, there
is no true face to face communication that many customers prefer, making it much
harder to help troubleshoot issues when one is not able to physically see the issue to
diagnose. This has resulted in an average customer services rating of 79.8 over the last
five years, far below what should be acceptable for such a big and dominant company.

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.
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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.
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Outcomes from Google Store


Not only would this increase customer satisfaction by allowing people to meet in
person for help, it would also save time and money, and also lower carbon dioxide
emissions.
With local stores in heavily populated areas, shipments from Texas to all over the
country will no longer be necessary. Customers could simply drive to a Google Store
and schedule a same day repair service or talk with a sales representative about their
options instead of an automated voice on the phone. If customers are outside driving
distance of the
store, they could
also just ship their
phone to the closest
of the ten stores. A
single phone will no
longer have to fly
from, for example,
Seattle, WA to
Texas and then be
flown back, in this
case the phone
would have to go to
the San Jose store
which cuts down the
travel distance from
2,100 miles to 840
miles.
This would save in money by not having Google have to ship each product
across the country multiple times if someone could come and pick it up or just ship it a
few hundred miles away rather than a few thousand.
Customers and Google would save in time by not having deliveries take over
thirty days by giving the customer the option to go to a store in person to seek help or
ship it a much shorter and thus a quicker distance.
Lastly, this would reduce the carbon dioxide emissions Google is responsible for
because of the lack of need of delivering products to customers.
I predict that since we would build these stores in the biggest cities in America,
which also happen to be the bigger technology hubs of the country, the number of
deliveries we make for customers will drop by about 70%.
Obviously, there will be outliers living in remote areas or cities without a store,
but with the majority of our customers coming from these ten major cities, we are able to
cover the biggest number of customers with the fewest numbers of stores.
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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.

Data Center Plan


My plan to finance the ten proof of concept stores I had proposed earlier is to
utilize our data centers and our knowledge of how to run them to gain extra revenue.
It has been already proven that we are able to work with other companies in this
way and that there is a demand for this product.
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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.

We would be able to generate this additional revenue because we already have


the existing infrastructure to provide these additional calculations from third party
companies and the knowledge and expertise of how to make more data centers.

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.
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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.
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Made to Stick
Proposed initiative based on the “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas” developed by Chip
Heath and Dan Heath.

This plan will greatly decrease the amount

Simple of carbon dioxide expelled from Google


delivery operations and also cut delivery
costs by opening Google Stores.

Google has never had a permanent

Unexpected physical store of this scale and will


generate a considerable amount of positive
press because of this surprise.

This project will cut carbon dioxide


emissions for the delivery of the Pixel
Concrete Phone by nearly 78,800,000 pounds and
generate at the least $728,000 a year at
the Google Stores.

Temporary Google Stores have been

Credible proven to work in New York and Los


Angeles and it has been proven to work by
Apple and Microsoft.

This project will drastically reduce the


carbon dioxide footprint of Google’s

Emotional delivery sector by hundreds of millions of


pounds of and help other companies be
more efficient with the resources used in
data centers.
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Cost Analysis
Carbon Dioxide Cost Analysis

Original Delivery Carbon Dioxide Costs

Flight Distance 1,575 miles

CO2 Emitted per Mile per Pound 1.31 pounds

Units of Pixel Phones Shipped 4,000,000

Package Weight 5 pounds

Total CO2 Emitted for Pixel Phone Original Deliveries 26,200,000 pounds

Repair/Replacement Delivery Carbon Dioxide Costs

Flight Distance 1,575 miles

CO2 Emitted per Mile per Pound 1.31 pounds

Units of Pixel Phones Shipped 8,000,000

Package Weight 5 pounds

Total CO2 Emitted for Pixel Phone Repair/Replacement


52,400,000 pounds
Deliveries
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Total Carbon Dioxide Emitted from all Deliveries

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

Google Store Cost Analysis

Initial Google Store Costs


Number of Stores 10 stores
Cost per Built Store (Includes real estate,
-$10,000,000
permits, furniture, lights, etc.)
Total Cost for all Stores -100,700,000

Annual Google Store Revenue


Number of Employees 10 employees
Annual Salary per Employee -$70,000
Minimum Annual Revenue per Store $728,000
Total Minimum Annual Revenue per Store $28,000

Data Center Cost Analysis

Revenue from Selling Data Center Computing


Minimum Number of Customers 10
Annual Revenue per Customer 10,000,000
Total Revenue from Selling Data Center Computing $100,000,000
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Assessment - How Will the Impact


be Measured
Deliveries
The impact of this project will be measured by how quickly we are able to
decrease the number of deliveries by we have to customers after our ten stores are built
and open for customers by approximately 70%.

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.

Customer Service Rating


Our average customer service from the past five years is 79.8, but once we are
able to have face to face customer service and eliminate deliveries, or at least minimize
delivery times because of the Google Store, I hope to grow our customer rating to 85
within the first three years. Obviously the first year our Google Stores are open
operations and logistics may not be the smoothest because it is our first time doing this
on such a scale, but once we are able to understand the subtle nuances and learn the
tricks and secrets, I believe that we will be able to exponentially improve our services.

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.
19

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

Dear Environmental Product Development Team,


Google is excited to announce the approval of the Stop All Deliveries on Earth
Project! We have been planning this for months and we finally believe that we are ready
to start with this great endeavor!
This is the first project of its kind in all of Google history, so we are thrilled to be
able to work with such a talented, passionate, and hardworking group of people.
While we know that no matter how much we plan and comb through the smallest
details there will still be issues and problems, we also know that we learn through these
mistakes and be able to make an even greater final product to make Earth a more
sustainable and healthy planet.
The S.A.D. Earth Project will not only help make Google a greener company
keeping our home healthy, we also get the opportunity to lead by example to other
companies and organizations around the world what is possible on any scale.
More details regarding specific steps outlining our timeline and project guidelines
will follow in the coming weeks. Please feel free to reach out or stop by my office at any
time or contact me via phone or email. My phone number is (888) 888-8888 and my
email is sbalebail@scu.edu.
I look forward to changing the world with you all one delivery at a time!

Thank you,
Shreyes Balebail
21

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