The state of the green IT economy

Will the recession be enough to finally drive the UK to consider green IT?

By Matt Chapman, 1 Jul 2009 at 12:03

Green is now more than a buzz word. With a recession demanding lower costs in every business and an overall push towards using less energy to halt climate change, it’s now a reality.

So how is the UK faring in this new world? Well, if a green study by HP is to be believed, not that well - just 16 per cent of UK businesses have a green policy in place.

“One of the things we found in the UK specifically is that procurement staff don’t really look for environmental factors a lot of the time,” says Bruno Zago, HP’s environment manager for UK and Ireland.

“When I see the tenders that a lot of the procurement managers send through, a lot of the large enterprises are sending out questionnaires around your environmental policy: what are you doing around carbon, what are you doing with your supply chain,” he adds.

“But when you ask them how heavily they use that to weight their decision, the heaviest I’ve ever seen is about 10 per cent in a contract. But it’s usually five per cent or below and that goes across enterprise and public sector as well.”

Not everyone thinks it’s down to procurement staff, however.

“I think it really does depend upon the corporation or the sector in which they operate,” counters Stuart Davis, business manager for Epson UK.

“In the public sector, green issues are very much a part of the tender process. In some other corporations, it is true to say that cost saving blurs with green issues, so a green product may be chosen but more because of lower running costs than specifically because it has a lower energy consumption.”

Recession boost for green IT?

With that implied cost saving, based on a lower overall use of energy, it’s possible that the move to greener products could even survive any cuts forced by the economic recession.

“The recession came in and that put paid to the frothy greenwash approach to climate change and sustainability,” says David Metcalfe, head of independent analyst Verdantix.

“What we’re seeing now is much more a focus around cost reduction and the fact that sustainability is about resource efficiency and therefore about operational efficiency.”

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2 comments

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Increasing pressure for green credentials will create a significant cost for businesses unless organisations get their asset registers in order.

Assessment of environmental practices and reporting is certainly on the increase for business and generic statements about green strategies – from procurement to recycling, carbon footprint to flexible working – will not suffice in the long term: organisations will have to prove their commitment through information transparency and auditable policies. At the heart of such transparency will be consistent, detailed information about the life cycle of every asset - from country of origin through maintenance schedules to final disposal. Existing green policies such as the WEEE directive and measuring carbon footprints assume a level of asset management far beyond that achieved by the majority of UK business. How many UK businesses can accurately identify the location of their WEEE equipment within the organisation and confirm when it was purchased and from whom? By linking the asset register to a document management system organisations can create the required audit trail, gaining valuable insight into their own assets and adapting to the ‘green economy’. Yours faithfully, Karen Conneely Group Commercial Manager Real Asset Management www.realassetmgt.co.uk

By Ip_olivean9b2a7c on Thursday Jul 2

GreenIT in the EU

Although I agree with some of the elements of this story, there needs to be some things pointed out. Regulation in the EU and US is currently driving innovation, until the introduction of Energy Star 4 and now Energy Star 5 computer power use was spiralling out of control – we all recall the Pentium 4 processor, resulting in machines like the Dimension 9200 – which according to Dells own datasheet uses in excess of 210W – now Energy Star 5 requires a dual core PC use about 46W. Procurement might only put a 10% weighting to ‘environmental’ criteria – which is usually criteria like materials content and toxicity. But procurement will put a 65%+ weighting on total cost of ownership – which includes energy use. Energy consumption on an ultra - efficient Energy Star 5.0 PC over a 5 year period (taking example a VeryPC unit) will account for 300KG of CO2 emissions. Whereas the embedded and transportation CO2 in the chassis is only responsible for 8KG of CO2 emissions. Energy Star, although a US standard is law in the EU for public procurement (rule 106/2008)– any procurement manager putting an IT tender out to the official Journal will almost certainly explicitly mention it by name. Regulation in the UK and EU doesn’t stop at energy efficiency, although ‘environmental’ weighting is only applied at the 10% level, there are minimum ecological criteria. For the public sector buyer DEFRA has a set of standards called “quick wins” which target ecological sustainability. Voluntary standards like EPEAT – which are heavily vendor driven are riddled with controversial gimmicks which don’t target true sustainability. This is why EPEAT is not allowed to be used in EU procurement – plus the fact that a gold rated EPEAT product might not even live up to the lowest ‘minimum’ standard set by DEFRA. This is because EPEAT sees as ‘optional’ what the EU considers basic mandatory on areas such as substances harmful to humans. EU Regulation is here to protect the consumer – whereas in my experience US regulation often serves the corporations who lobbied for it in the first place. Large US centric companies don’t always get this and some have become disjointed from what the EU expect, they play lip service to sustainability to please their potential audience. When it comes to regulation these organisations are more likely to be just ticking the box instead of looking to excel in the area of sustainability. As for the £3000 laptop – this is utter non-sense, VeryPC (www.very-pc.co.uk) currently make a machine called the TT3V which when sporting a quad core processor exceeds the Energy Star 5 standard by over 50%. Yet the TT3V is offered at a reasonable price. VeryPC are reporting huge rises in sales and this is proof there is a solid Green IT economy, the big IT companies probably want to slow down the consumer moves towards it so they can catch up.

By petehopton on Tuesday Jul 7