The greening of IT: Why less is more

Vendors are way off track

'Green IT' has become the buzzword du jour but so far the industry's efforts to become more environmentally friendly are well off track. Futurity Media's Stewart Baines explains what they're missing - and what more they could do.

A day doesn't go by without another software, hardware or electronics firms professing its newly found green credentials. Not only can this be misleading, it distracts us from what we really need to do so save our fragile earth: consume less, reuse more.

The problem with the greening of IT is that - admittedly this is a generalisation - the underlying goal is to get you to buy more: new servers with more energy-efficient processors, intelligent sensors for data centre coolant systems, server virtualisation software, low-power monitors, tools that turn off dormant computers and so on.

Worthy though these are, and of course I cannot condemn such efforts, we must be very careful about the return on investment (ROI) claims than many vendors make. 'If you buy our new servers, in three years the energy savings from reducing cooling will provide payback' and so on.

ROI calculations tend to be overly simplistic with too few criteria. Do you account for the full environmental impact cost when you plug the server replacement figures into the ROI? Is there a value for corporate social responsibility? The truth is that vendor-led ROI calculations are part of consultancy selling, an invidious way of making you think the vendor is partnering with you and sharing your risks and goals.

That said, the industry's recent interest in conserving power in data centres and computers is long overdue. Data centres in particular have come under severe criticism for their insatiable appetite for energy to power the processors and then keep them from overheating.

IDC estimates that for ever dollar spent on IT hardware, 50 cents are spent on energy, and by 2010 the total power and cooling bill for US data centres per year could reach $50bn.

There are many initiatives and technologies that will help reduce energy demand within the data centre. Virtualisation, for instance, will cut the number of required servers. Intelligent cooling will cool only where necessary. Low-power processors won't generate as much heat and so on.

But the data centre will continue to grow and grow as we store more data and watch more videos and as middle classes emerge in developing economies who want access to the trappings of the 21st century.

Yes, we must where possible reduce the power demands of the data centre but computing and electronics are proliferating. As a whole, IT's output of carbon dioxide will increase despite the improved energy efficiency of individual hardware.

Beyond reducing emissions

There is also a danger that green IT simply equates to reducing carbon dioxide emissions in order to slow climate change. Our fragile ecology is under much more of a threat than that. Green technology must also mean a responsibility towards the extraction and dumping of hazardous chemicals, destroying natural habitats to make way for acre after acre of bio-fuel crops and preventing civil wars in under-developed economies where essential raw minerals for batteries and processors can be found.

Last year Greenpeace rated the major PC manufacturers on how well they dealt with harmful chemicals integral to the production of their laptops - including lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, bromine, polybrominated flame retardants and PVCs - and took responsibility for recycling products discarded by consumers.

Along with using toxic chemicals, the manufacturing process for one PC requires around two tonnes of raw materials and generates around 25 tonnes of CO2. Greenpeace has spent the last year berating vendors and subsequently there have been significant moves by Apple, Dell, Lenovo and others to clean up their act.

Retailer PC World, for instance, now offers a green PC - featuring a recycled aluminium case and wood from sustainable forests in the screen bezel, mouse and keyboard - and is purchasing carbon offsets against the manufacturing process. It reckons the system will use 40 watts compared to the 300 watts of a standard desktop. Sounds good. Next time I need a PC - and hopefully my 2002 model will last a couple more years - I might get me one.

Also vendors such as Apple and Dell have set up schemes in the US to take back old PCs and safely recycle them. But this does require the owner to actually buy the hardware in the first place.

Do more to impact less

In 2006 Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote: "If the biosphere is wrecked, it will not be done by those who couldn't give a damn about it, as they now belong to a diminishing minority. It will be destroyed by nice, well-meaning, cosmopolitan people who accept the case for cutting emissions but who won't change by one iota the way they live."

This sounds very much like the IT industry. We are aware of the problem but blame someone else for green procurement being too expensive.

Much of the contribution you can make to reduce your footprint does not require significant new capital expenditure. The National Energy Foundation estimated that 1.7 million PCs in the UK are routinely left on when not being used. So turn off the PC when you're not using it. Don't print so much. Take the train rather than drive to that meeting - better still use a conferencing or collaboration tool. Eke out another year of using your mobile phone. Lengthen upgrade cycles, and that includes software as this is frequently used as justification for upgrading hardware.

Only when you have proved you can conserve and reuse should you be allowed to recycle and upgrade to energy efficient technologies. By then the efforts by the industry such as the Green Grid, Climate Savers Computing Initiative and the UK's Green Technology Initiative will eventually bring green down to a low cost. But you will need to be responsible too. A green PC isn't green when it's left on, when it's upgraded every 18 months and when it finds its way into a landfill, even if it now contains less toxic chemicals.

In the coming months Futurity Media will be investigating green IT, grappling with such questions as: Is the IT industry really helping to reduce its impact on the environment? Are businesses simply kowtowing to CSR goals? Are telcos the worst culprits? What harmful products are going into our latest gadgets? Should Silicon Valley be spending its philanthropic billions searching for efficient renewables and a fuel cell breakthrough?

Stay tuned.