Environmentally friendly IT
21 November 2008
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Environmental issues affect all parts of our day to day lives, including our businesses. No matter what size your business is, it can save resources, reduce waste and, most importantly, save you money. All of which helps to establish you as a socially responsible employer.
Technology can contribute a fair amount to your running costs as well as your overall environmental footprint. Over the next few years legislation will increasingly start to affect smaller businesses and force behavioural changes along with overall attitudes to the environment.
 
The good news is that you can start the process now, and by saving the environment you may be able to save money for your business. By supporting environmentally friendly IT initiatives today, you can be ahead of the game.
 
 
What is a green business?
 
There are many measures of how green or environmentally friendly your business is, ranging from carbon footprints through to complex companywide audits. In practice it only takes a few steps to achieve considerable environmental savings and these need not impact the effectiveness of the business.
 
Though this guide takes a more detailed look at IT savings, don't forget the non-IT related changes that can also help you become environmentally friendly. Remember, a green business is one that takes efforts to reduce its environmental impact overall and aims to become a socially responsible citizen.
 

IT and the environment
 
If you take a look around your work place you are bound to have any number of computers and other IT related equipment in use. IT equipment takes resources and energy to create, run and dispose of and therefore each piece of hardware you use carries an impact on the environment. There is little we can do to influence the creation of IT equipment but there are things we can do that affect the day to day use of IT and its eventual disposal.
 

Computer power consumption
 
Most people will start up their computer in the morning and only switch it off at night, leaving it on all day, often wasting power. An obvious solution would be to turn off your PC when you go out for lunch and certainly when you leave the office at night. Yes, it may take a while for the PC to boot up in the morning but think of the energy saved.
 
Modern operating systems have a feature so that if a PC is left idle for a pre-determined time it will automatically enter standby mode, switching off the monitor and hard disk, effectively sending the PC to sleep. A few minutes taken to set this up on each PC can start to save money from day one. The benefit of using standby mode is that the PC will restart a lot quicker than from "cold", but remember it will still be consuming some power, so turning it off completely is always best.
 
Remember that other peripherals such as printers and external hard drives also consume power. Turning these off, especially at night when they are not needed, will also help you save money and the environment.
 
 
Printing
 
People have been foretelling the age of the paperless office for years but it would seem that we simple humans are often better at reading from a piece of paper than we are on a screen. So, even if we accept that printers aren't going anyway just yet, there are still some steps we can take to reduce the cost of printing.
    • Use recycled print cartridges and recycled paper, or a paper of less thickness or weight.
    • Double sided printing is a great way of saving money as is encouraging printing only when it is absolutely necessary.
    • Once you have printed out documents that you no longer need, recycle the paper appropriately.
    • If used paper is blank on one side and not confidential in nature then use the blank side as note paper, so at least you are maximising the use of the paper.

IT hardware
 
Most computers are under utilised. Their hard disks are often half empty and their central processor is only busy for a small fraction of the working day. Unfortunately the energy a computer consumes is pretty much the same if it is busy or quiet as it still needs cooling and the monitor still needs powering. To deal with this issue there is a move to consolidate computer hardware so that fewer computers are being used but those that are being employed are working at their maximum potential. This saves money, space and energy. If you look around your office, take a note to see if there are PCs that may be under used and consider consolidating them onto fewer physical servers.
 
Environmental issues can be complex and very involved, but by taking these simple steps you will start to see an immediate cost saving and benefit the environment at the same time.
 

Useful links
 
For more information on IT and environmental issues, see the Carbon Footprint and DEFRA websites.
 

About the author

This article was first published as Environmentally friendly IT and reducing waste in your business on Business IT Guide, part of e-skills, the Sector Skills Council for IT and telecoms. The Business IT Guide has been developed in collaboration with industry experts to help small businesses find the right IT solutions for the issues that affect them.