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Is your IT really green?
December 5, 2007
If the green movement will keep going through the supply chain next year (which it probably will), any tools to help understand a company's impact on Mother Earth will be helpful, and potentially profitable. A new report, titled "The Inefficient Truth," clearly a play on the title of the Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," has been released by Global Action Plan, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in the UK.
The full report, available for free here, has plenty of appeal to a mainstream audience and seems to be focused primarily on the UK, but supply chain managers worldwide who are looking for places to "green up" their operations could learn a lot from it, too, especially those with a goal of having a more environmentally-friendly IT department.
Just a few quick facts from the report's executive summary:
1,000 computers left on 24/7 without a power save function activated waste close to $150,000 worth of electricity. Also consider that another $70,000 - $75,000 worth is probably also spent on dissipating the heat caused by all that running equipment, using fans or other cooling systems.
Servers use as much energy keeping cool as they do in performing operations that generate the heat in the first place. The report found the overall carbon footprint, or amount of net greenhouse gas generated by the production of the energy used by a medium-sized server is about the same as that coming from a SUV running with a fuel efficiency of 15 miles to the gallon.
For those who think we're becoming a "paperless" society, consider this: In 1980, before the PC became a staple in offices and homes everywhere, world office paper consumption was about 70 million tons a year. By 1997, that figure had grown (yes, grown) to nearly 150 million tons. Who knows how big that's gotten in the past 10 more years?
Interesting food for thought, and the rest of the report will likely be a valuable read for green thinkers everywhere.
Posted by Sean Murphy on December 5, 2007 | Comments (0)