The energy it took to play the song Despacito five billion times on YouTube could have powered 110,000 homes for a year, according to a Kent Data Centre.

To tackle the hidden impact businesses have on the environment, the Kent Wildlife Trust is encouraging companies of all kinds to come together and discuss ways of making their practices more environmentally-friendly.

It has set up the Kent Business Environment Network - or Kent BEN for short.

Evan Bowen-Jones, Kent Wildlife Trust's chief executive, said: “One of the main groupings in society that can be doing more to help us combat the climate and nature crisis is businesses.

"Climate change has been recognised in parliament and reached a stage of recognition that it never has before.

“The Kent BEN is to bring private sector companies, ranging from single and sole source traders through to small to medium enterprises to big business, all together to share their ideas, good practice concerns and questions about how we collectively can make business and society more sustainable.”

Kent BEN hopes to allow businesses to become part of the broader solution, in a way that comes easier for organisations like Kent Wildlife Trust.

So far, the charity has held two launch events where they have aired the idea to more than 100 businesses, from technology firms to goods and service providers, to solicitors and insurers.

Leonard Kay, commercial manager at Custodian Data Centre, attended the second event to speak to businesses about the energy use of data centres and how her firm is one of the greenest in the world.

Some businesses need constant maintenance of their IT infrastructure, so they go to data centres to look after their servers.

The website you are reading right now is stored on servers at Custodian.

Servers use energy every time you use the internet - and often more than we think.

Mr Kay told us that 40,000 US homes could be run on the same energy as Despacito's five billion YouTube views, which is equal to running 110,000 homes in the UK.

The fact five billion Despacito views could run this many homes becomes much more astounding when you realise five billion YouTube videos are watched daily.

Based on these statistics, a year's worth of YouTube views could run 40.4 million UK homes and could fuel Kent's 672,010 dwellings for about 60 years.

Mr Kay said: “Data centres around the world use more power than all of the UK, so we've always worked hard to use less energy.

"We've been in touch with the Kent Wildlife Trust for a while and when they started this initiative it was something we were really keen to be involved with.”

Coolers will often be used with servers so they run more efficiently and do not overheat.

However, according to Mr Kay, conventional cooler systems tend to use a huge amount of energy.

At the Kent BEN event, he told the attendees about how Custodian uses air and fan cooling to make their operations five times more efficient.

An additional evaporative cooling system uses a fine moisture mist to efficiently cool hot air on warmer days.

Being skeptical of paying outside organisations to plant trees, Mr Kay says: “We've also got our own area of woodland and we're working with the Kent Wildlife Trust and FGS Agri - one of the other people we met at the event.

“We're physically going to take our staff to our land and plant trees, rather than just accept that we can pay somebody to ease our conscience.

“This particular subject is really close to our hearts. Most of us are from Kent, we've got children that are going to inherit the planet. It sounds a bit corny but it matters.

“So we decided that we could actually do this ourselves rather than pay somebody else to take some profit from it and do it elsewhere.

"This way we get to actually see what's going on.”

Many businesses are taking part because the actions of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikers have shone a spotlight on the issue of climate change.

Even the Kent Wildlife Trust has changed its message to respond to the current fears surrounding climate change, presenting themselves as part of the solution - though its goals and practices have remained the same.

The trust protects wildlife on 9,000 acres of their 80 reserves around Kent and aims to create a good quality habitat by working with local communities, decision-makers, and statutory authorities like the Environment Agency.

Mr Bowen-Jones added: “Obviously we're doing it at a time when there are significant concerns across society about the amount of wildlife we're losing and the impacts there could be around things like pollinators - which could actually threaten our food security.

“It's one thing declaring an emergency like that, but if you don't have an action plan on what we’re actually going to do about it, then that's quite a big missing piece.

"And we could sit around and we could wait until that's brought together nationally, but actually stronger initiatives are normally those that are built from the ground up.

“But we’ll very much make it a business lead thing and make the ideas come from the business community for them to generate the program going forward.

“When we sit in that room, I want to be a business amongst many rather than leading it.

"We also obviously want to link it to delivering our own mission and getting as many businesses as possible to buy into the idea that we can create a world again.”

When asked about how being environmentally conscious could affect the bottom line of companies, Mr Bowen-Jones said: “The business case for doing the right thing it's pretty strong.

"You can save huge amounts of money on your electric bill by putting in energy-efficient lights.

“The initial expenditure might be more than you'd pay for normal light bulbs but actually then they last 20 years. The payoff is obvious to anyone with a business brain.

“I suppose broadly there are going to be things which are going to have a cost. There's absolutely no way around that.

"I think the bigger question is 'what is the cost if we don't tackle these things'?

“If businesses don't look at long term sustainability over short term profit, they won't survive going forwards this century because of the threats to the environment and the threats to nature.

"If we don't deal with them, then there will be no economy left, if you want to look at it into its most extreme.”

Mr Kay praised what he has seen so far of Kent BEN, saying: “It's making businesses think. The people I spoke to there are not there just for the sake of it, they're not people who've just been sent off to tick a box to look after their corporate responsibility policy.

"If businesses don't look at long term sustainability over short term profit, they won't survive going forwards because of the threats to the environment and nature" - Evan Bowen-Jones

“It was more than that. These people actually cared and they were going back to their businesses to properly take on board what was being discussed and I think that's great.

“I think I probably got as much advice given to me as we gave out, so it started a conversation."

This is the first environment network to be set up in Kent and Mr Bowen-Jones is hopeful for its future after seeing a similar network thrive in the West Midlands.

He added: "Whenever you create something like this, you start with those who are more disposed towards getting involved as a starting point, and then you hope to build it from there."

He encouraged more businesses to join the conversation: “The whole idea is that we take people who feel like they're too small to get involved or don't have enough idea of what their environmental impact is and what scale of solution they could be involved with.

"We get them into a room with other businesses, so they should go away from every event learning something that they think they can apply.”

Businesses can look on the Kent Wildlife Trust website to find out how to get involved with the events that are being run over the next year.

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