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Execs from Dell, HPE and Atos on why sustainable IT is crucial

Execs from tech giants joined with the WWF and UN to champion Defra's new environmental guide

Executives from a host of channel firms joined together to compel their peers to make sustainability a key message and focus for their businesses.

Bosses from companies such as HPE, Dell, Capgemini and Atos - alongside the likes of the UN, UNICEF and the WWF - took to the stage at the launch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) Industry Sustainability Guide to hammer home the importance to IT firms of having a circular economy.

CRN highlights the key messages from industry leaders at yesterday's event at the Natural History Museum in London.

Change the system

Deborah Tripley, director of environmental policy and advocacy at WWF UK, told the audience - which included representatives from Google Cloud, UK Cloud and Tech UK - that the industry needs to overhaul its processes to be more sustainable but that can only be achieved by each business doing its own part to "change its systems".

"People here need to be thinking about what life cycle change looks like," she stated.

"The system has to change and I don't think we have focused much on the reduction [side of things]. What system change are you going to do? If you don't change, you are going to be on the wrong side of history."

Her sentiment was echoed by Marc Waters, HPE's MD for UK and EMEA. He added that change comes from people and their behaviours and that this push needs to come from the top level.

He recounted a recent experience with a large hedge fund customer. He asked his team if they had mentioned the circular economy during the meeting, and the team replied that it wasn't applicable to this particular customer as the value and sensitivity of the customer's data meant it had to be destroyed and buried and therefore couldn't be recycled.

"I later met with the CEO and told him about our technology renewal centre in Glasgow," he explained.

"We had a great conversation about it and he was very committed on sustainability, and it turned out that that process [of destruction] was just something they've done for a very long time, and when they started to look into it, it wasn't really required to give them the security that they needed - it was just what they had always done.

"Now we recycle and reuse that technology, but it wouldn't have happened, even at an IT manager level. It was only at that senior level within a company that change was driven."

The procurement process makes you an influencer

Concerns were raised from the audience about a David versus Goliath situation where public sector organisations don't feel they have the influence to hold large hosting providers to task over reducing the emissions and energy consumption from their datacentres.

Chris Howes (pictured), chief digital and information officer at Defra, said the procurement process is when the power is in the public sector organisation's hands and this is when they need to flag up concerns to cloud providers about energy consumptions.

"Your leverage with the major cloud providers might seem small at times but there are times when your leverage is greater than others', typically when you're procuring," he explained.

"[That is when] you work out how you best build in those kinds of requirements into those processes. That kind of pressure - that market demand - will not go unnoticed by those organisations, who are extremely competitive.

"We just need to make sure that we take the opportunity to make it clear that these issues are important to us and therefore if they want to have that purchasing then that's one way of doing it."

E-waste is an exponentially growing problem

The industry has to wake up to the issue of e-waste, that of the materials and metals that are disposed of when IT kit is thrown away.

Last month Andy Gomarsall, director at IT asset disposal firm N2S - who also took part in the event - told CRN's MSP Conference that the shortage of raw metals available will cause sustainability to be centre stage in the next few years.

His comments were echoed by Sandra Averous Monnery, programme officer at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), who told the audience that the value of raw materials in all EU waste is estimated at $55bn (£43bn).

"There are components and materials that are very valuable which are calling for recycling opportunities," she said.

"There are a lot of opportunities that we can see from the public sector for companies to look into the opportunities in the electronics sector and there is the potential to improve recycling.

"We have to improve these recycling rates so that we reduce the use of raw materials. It is the responsibility of everyone, not just the supply chain, but also looking into design and how to extend the life cycle of the product."

Datacentre do-better

The cloud is often seen to be a sustainable and carbon-neutral way of implementing business processes, but many who use it are unaware of the high levels of energy consumption used by datacentres.

Kulveer Ranger, SVP of strategy and communications at Atos, said that the majority of cloud consumers are unaware of the effect their everyday use of the cloud is having on the environment, stating that datacentres used 30 per cent more energy than the entirety of the UK last year.

"There are these siloed huge guzzling datacentres around the world that are sucking up vast amounts of energy and we just don't realise they're there," he told attendees.

"The question is: when will the penny drop for all of us and everybody out there about their relationship to those datacentres? So that tweet, that Facebook post, that Instagram post - they have a price.

"It may not feel like it because a lot of these things seem to be 'free', but there is a consumption, there is a link, there's data that's generated, there's a footprint and that digital footprint does effectively lead to a carbon footprint."

Companies and authorities need to band together to scrutinise energy consumption by datacentres, Ranger stated, adding that they need to be looked at on a use-by-use basis.

"We need to be clear that we can over-engineer systems," he said.

"We can have things running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In some cases, that makes sense. In other cases, it does not.

"We need to be more concerned about actually designing a service around what is required, not just because that's how it should be done. So more scrutiny about design and more scrutiny about exactly what it is that we need to provide in the service that we're providing.

"There's much that can be done and sometimes it's about the common sense approach as much as it is about innovation."