January saw several high profile firms – including Tesco, BT, and British Airways – say they are joining forces to extol the virtues of Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (CSER).
In the IT world Dell chairman Michael Dell used the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Ve-gas as a platform to announce it was time IT took a lead in environmental issues.
Dell announced a ‘plant a tree for me’ programme which would give the customer the option of voluntarily donating US$2 for a laptop or US$6 for a desktop to help fund a worldwide tree-planting programme to offset the impact of the carbon emissions used to generate the power to run the equipment during its lifetime – which Dell estimates is three years. Dell did not say if it was do-nating any funding to the programme to cover the carbon emissions generated in manufacture. More important, neither did Dell include server products in the scheme. Servers use more power than lap-top or desktop devices because they are typically run 24×7, while laptop and desktops normally op-erate only eight to ten hours daily.
Big question
Dell was not the first IT organisation to announce initiatives aimed at becoming more environmen-tally aware. Chip maker VIA announced in September that its new C7-D chip would be carbon-neutral from an energy consumption perspective. VIA used a UK consultancy, Carbon Footprint, to calculate the impact the C7-D would have over its lifetime. VIA claims that, given a three-year life-span, the C7-D would require four trees to be planted for each chip sold.
This questions the Dell announcement, as the C7-D is only the processor chip – and if used at full capacity of 1.8GHz it consumes 20W of power. So the question is whether US$6 (about EUR * 4.60) for a desktop covers the cost of being carbon-neutral. I would contend that using Carbon Footprint’s figures and an estimate from IE, a UK-based desktop management vendor, that an aver-age desktop consumes 200W and that US$6 would need to fund the planting of considerably more than four trees to be carbon-neutral.
Another environmentally aware vendor is HP, which has been recycling products since 1987 and last year began a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund (Irish Computer, January) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide.
Good for business
Butler Group believes other organisations are just beginning to recognise that being seen as green is good for business. However, as HP clearly demonstrates, if you do not generate headline-grabbing announcements, your efforts will go largely unrecognised. As customers and investors push organi-sations to consider environmental issues, we predict that 2007 will become the green year, with many more carbon-neutral initiatives being announced by leading vendors.
The difficulty will be making sense of the initiatives, and verifying if they do equate to carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers