Green economics?
- Article 71 of 77
- Information Age, June 2005
Environmentally conscious IT policies can be good for both the planet and the bottom line.
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Technology integration and services company Morse goes even further than Maxitech and claims that its “asset retirement programme” can at the very least not cost money – which given the cost of storing obsolete equipment is one step up – and will usually produce in large organisations a revenue of £10,000 to £100,000 a year.
“It can be done a number of ways,” says Steve Mellings, a specialist in the decommissioning of IT equipment at Morse. “The traditional way is the trade-in where a customer would purchase new hardware, return the equipment to use and then to the vendor and they would receive an amount of money in return for that.”
Vendors, such as Dell, Sun, IBM and HP, are creating extensive buy-back programmes for their own equipment, offering between 4 and 20% of the list value of new equipment. This is partly to reduce the amount of second-hand hardware available within channels and to increase customer loyalty. But it is also a response to the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive, due to come into force in the UK in August, which will require equipment manufacturers to assume responsibility for the disposal of hardware they manufacture. Since it also limits how much can be put into a landfill, many parts of computers will be recycled and manufacturers are already changing their hardware’s construction and raw materials to make them easier to recycle.
Mellings says that most organisations are unaware of WEEE and should discuss it with their suppliers when negotiating contracts: many, for instance, would not know that if a company sells the organisation a monitor, for example, it would have to take back one of its own old monitors as part of the deal.
The second option is a buy-back. “We would effectively buy back the equipment and then broker it on their behalf or dispose of it.” Mellings says there’s a significant market in Eastern Europe and Asia for Pentium III desktops, for example; the cost of shipping the PC is usually more than equalled by the sales cost, and at the very least is less of a cost than disposing of the PC in a landfill.
“Green IT” may seem less than mainstream at the moment, but most vendors and analysts agree that it will become more and more important over the next few years. EU legislation such as WEEE will provide considerable opportunities for revenue returns from old IT equipment. As organisations start to look more at ongoing costs of hardware as well as initial acquisition costs, the products that use the least power and the least consumables will quickly stand out as having the lowest TCO. And in the data centre, only those technologies that run the coolest will be economically viable as rack densities increase. Green IT’s time is coming – disguised as commonsense economics.
Case study: Lex Vehicle Leasing
Based in Slough, Lex Vehicle Leasing is a joint venture between the RAC and Halifax that provides contract hire for company car and van fleets. In 1996, the company decided it wanted to reduce the environmental impact of its business – and save money – by redesigning its business round the environmental ISO 14001 certification.
One of the company’s aims was to reduce the company’s carbon dioxide output by a third. Helen Counsell, quality environmental manager at Lex, says a number of IT policies were introduced to do this and achieve other green aims. “We replaced all of our CRT monitors with LCD monitors: they use less power and emit less radiation. We donated all our old PCs to charity for re-use elsewhere. We implemented faxing from PCs to reduce the amount of paper we used and implemented double-sided printing wherever possible. We monitored which departments used more paper, and found out how to manage the peaks and troughs of printing.” In its more remote offices, the company also chose to use thin clients running Citrix to connect them to the main business systems in Manchester.
On top of these more visible IT policies, the company has implemented remote working for employees, installing phone lines at their homes and giving them broadband connections. This saves many employees the difficulty of the morning commute altogether in some cases, or offsets it outside peak hours so the time spent in traffic jams and at lower speeds – and therefore greenhouse gas output - is reduced. Since few employees change any of their houses’ heating settings or print many documents at home, the overall effect is a benefit to the environment and improved staff morale from flexible working.
The biggest benefit IT has brought to the company’s bottom line through green policies has been video conferencing. Introduced at the end of 2003, video conferencing is used wherever possible between the company’s other sites in Manchester, Marlow and Stirling, with the Lex IT Centre in India, and with suppliers in the US.
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