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

“When people talk about greener printing, the ability to print double sided seems to be a very important purchasing decision. But actually, when you start to talk to the users, only about 50 per cent of them are actually using double sided,” revealed HP’s Zago. “I think all of us tend to take the easiest and quickest route and click the print button without thinking,” agreed Davis.

However, unlike many areas of a business, technology often supplies answers that can push users in the right direction. “The way to overcome this is to set the default setting on the printer to duplex, then it is up to the user to choose single sided printing when required,” Davis added.

“When you talk about employees, I believe there’s a quote from Lenin, which is: Trust is a nice thing. But control is better,” said HP’s Zago. “So for example, you can actually set it up so one user can only print double-sided, one can’t use the colour machine, another can only print a certain times. And if you know the office closes at 5.30pm on a Friday and doesn’t open until 8am on a Monday morning, you can set the printers to sleep that whole time.”

“The same thing would apply on any green measure - you can't appeal to users' better nature, they can be too set in their ways,” offers Gartner’s Millman. “Better to default to the green standard and allow users to adjust to the new way of working. There will still be holdouts but the overall benefit will be greater.”

Could manufacturers take a hit?

In the end, the greatest threat to a switch to greener products is still be the uptake by businesses. Analyst David Metcalfe went so far as to suggest that until consumers fully back environmental products, manufacturers could actually be putting themselves in danger if they move ahead too quickly with them.

“You can’t push the buying side too quickly until there’s a change in behaviour,” he says. “There’s currently a difficult economic climate and most companies aren’t ready for radical change in either spending more or doing things differently if it’s going to cost more to buy more sustainable products.”

“HP is one of the firms we’ve looked at and it’s positioning itself for changes in customer behaviour when it gets to 2012. It would be a loss-making strategy to try and leap faster than that. It’s no point pushing ahead with some £3,000 laptop that only 50 people are going to buy. And we’ve seen a number of companies really struggling who’ve gone way too far ahead of the customers.”

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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