Computer Dealer News, November 23, 2007, Vol 23 No. 17

20 Questions on Green IT

20 experts from around the world provide the answer to some of the most burning questions involving the Green IT movement
1/28/2008 3:44:00 PM By: Sarah Lysecki

Everyone can attest to how the IT industry has changed their lives but until more recently most people didn't think about the toll it was taking on the environment. The fact the high tech industry is a major culprit in global pollution is no secret, with images of computer graveyards in third-world countries and campaigns by environmental groups being plastered all over the Internet.

To their credit, tech vendors have implemented recycling programs and are starting to provide their customers with information on how to become more “green.” At the political level, governments such as the European Union are passing tougher legislation for companies to manufacture more environmentally-friendly and recyclable products. However, Canada and the U.S. have yet to pass federal laws on this.

To find out how green the IT industry truly is, CDN interviewed 20 experts across the technology sector, government, as well as environmental and advocacy groups. Read on to see what they said.

1. Chris Stoate, president of Laser Networks, an Oakville-based VAR that specializes in printer outsourcing

CDN: Is it necessary for customers to pay a premium for green-friendly technology, and are they willing to pay that premium?

Stoate: I would say it's not necessary in every situation. If we can get the externalities into the operating costs of things, then there will be a payback even in the cases where you do have to pay more upfront.

Most of our customers see that they are getting dollar savings, and the environmental savings are a bonus. We have a lot of customers that are very proud of the fact that they are reducing their carbon footprint by using our technology.

We would be willing to pay a premium to get an environmental benefit that came over time, and that also had an economic return that was later rather than sooner. We would do that even in cases where we wouldn't do it on a pure cost analysis if we saw an environmental benefit.

2) Christopher Mines, senior vice-president, Forrester Research

CDN: Vendors are talking about green issues, but is it impacting customer buying decisions?

Mines: Forrester recently surveyed enterprise IT organizations to find out how important environmental concerns are in planning their IT operations. Thirty-seven per cent of respondents said they were very important, while 59 per cent said somewhat important with the remaining six per cent indicating not important - down from 13 per cent in that category six months ago. When asked if their company has changed its IT procurement criteria to account for environmental factors like recycling or energy efficiency, 36 per cent said Yes - up from 25 per cent six months ago - and 64 per cent said No.

In my interviews with enterprise IT, I have found that companies have different degrees of seriousness about green criteria in their purchasing criteria and buying decisions. For most companies, green criteria such as energy efficient products, responsible manufacturing and recycling, are a “tie breaker” when other factors such as price and performance are equal. For some, a few, green criteria are a “deal breaker” where a company that does not meet the criteria will be disqualified from the bidding.

3) Zeina Alhaj, campaign coordinator, Greenpeace International, Amsterdam

CDN: Are technology vendors doing enough to address green issues, and how do their efforts compare to other manufacturers?

Alhaj: We have definitely in the last five years seen a huge shift for the better within the IT industry when it comes to environmental responsibility and environmental policies and practices. We started to witness 10 years ago the impact of this industry.

We've seen a huge change with this industry because we started to see the images of the electronic devices dumped all over, and particularly the shocking images were coming from China and India and the developing countries. The industry started to realize that there is a problem and there should be action on it. Dell, for example, has a global system of take-back. Companies like Lenovo are doing that. We've seen companies like Apple acting on it. It's still mainly in the Western world, not all over the world for Apple but it is there.

What is still very much lacking by this industry in terms of environmental performance is basically the value of the product. The products are being produced with the sole purpose of selling them. That has a huge environmental bill, because each of these products uses a lot of resources from our planet. They use copper, they use lead, they use silver, they use gold, they use a lot of minerals that all have to be mined. Unfortunately, without acknowledging the second life cycle of product, we've been dumping resources.

4) Brian Rosenberg, business unit executive, site and facilities services, IBM Global Technology, Winnipeg

CDN: How big of a role do green issues such as energy efficiency, carbon footprint, garbage, waste, water, space and transit play in the value proposition that you pitch to prospective customers when they are looking at upgrading their data centre?

Rosenberg: Green continues to play a significant role in the value proposition we are pitching. The data centre energy crisis is continuing to cause concern for our customers around the world. All indications are the problem will continue to escalate over the next five years. If you consider that the energy usage in a data centre is apprx. 30 times that of a regular office space you start to quickly realize the magnitude of the problem.

IBM's roadmap was designed to help customers save money while focusing on doing what's right for our planet. Internally we will eat our own cooking and will double the square footage of our internal data centres without spending one additional kilowatt of energy.

5) John Baird, Environment Minister of Canada

CDN: What role can the federal government play in furtherance of Green IT?

EC: Environment Canada does not offer rebates or incentives. Natural Resources Canada may have incentive programs to support improving energy efficiency in buildings. However, purchasing energy efficient IT equipment and enabling the energy-saving features on them, as well as turning the equipment off after hours, can lead to substantial energy savings and therefore cost savings over the life of the equipment.

6) Marc Duchesne, director of corporate responsibility and environment, Bell Canada

CDN: How is Bell making use of the Green Meeting Calculator and why did it decide to develop the Smart Meeting Guide?

Duchesne: The Green Meeting Calculator is a tool that supports The Smart Meeting Guide.

We were looking at getting the message out to our own employee base when we first started this. We were looking at changing our habits in terms of travel business habits with business travel within the company, leveraging our own products and services to conferencing solutions.

We then started to calculate our own emissions that were avoided through the use of our solutions internally. We piloted it to our customer base and developed an algorithm to determine what the savings are for a certain company on a meeting basis, an employee basis or for the whole year.

The Guide is a very simple approach to lay out the benefits. It uses the work/life balance component and the productivity component and the cost just highlights green, yellow, red, which one costs more, and which one is more associated with work/life balance.

The Green Meeting Calculator just gives you the greenhouse gas emissions component. It doesn't go through the financial aspect of it or it doesn't quantify the other social benefits but it does calculate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that you would avoid.

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