Monday 4 June 2007

Environmentally Sustainable IT

We are approaching another federal government election in Australia, and today one of the hot pre-election topics is climate change. Coincidentally I was browsing through the May/June 2007 edition of Image & Data Manager magazine today and noticed that they had a special feature on environmentally sustainable IT.

A quick google around and I find that Gartner is currently leading (or perhaps fuelling?) interest in green IT by putting the blame for 2% of global CO2 emissions on the door step of the ICT industry:

"CO2 emissions that ICT is responsible for includes the in-use phase of PCs, servers, cooling, fixed and mobile telephony, local area network (LAN), office telecommunications and printers. Gartner has also included an estimate of the embodied (that used in design, manufacture and distribution) energy in large-volume devices, namely PCs and cell phones."

CSC (my current employer) have a study tour later in the year looking at green IT - they describe the issue this way:

"The high cost of energy, the threat of global warming, and rising societal pressures will eventually force just about every firm to take a hard look at its environmental impact. Effective IT leadership will be essential if companies are to improve and demonstrate Corporate Social Responsibility in areas such as power and cooling systems, office design, PC and paper recycling, production and supply chain efficiencies, air travel, telecommuting, employee cooperation, measurements, and regulatory compliance."

BTW The closing date for study tour registrations is 12 October.

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