How sustainable is the UK channel? My 3 key takeaways

Doug Woodburn reflects on first month of CRN Tech Impact Campaign and Awards

When we launched our Tech Impact Campaign and Awards on 1 March, I made a plea for sustainability visionaries to come forward and share their stories.

If this campaign has one mission, it is to spread environmental and social sustainability best practice across all tiers of the channel.

I'm delighted to say the channel has answered that call in a big way.

View the campaign hub here and awards categories here.

Since 1 March, I've chatted to a distributor that hopes to be the first company of its kind to achieve carbon neutrality and an IT services powerhouse that is aiming for net zero by 2028.

I've covered the latest sustainability manoeuvres from an array of vendors, including Google, HP and a Swiss mini-PC manufacturer.

And I've also caught up with a range of other interested parties whose mission it is to help the channel measure and improve their sustainability (see here and here)

Here are my three key takeaways from my first four weeks of conversations:

1) The time is now

As a journalist who has occasionally covered green IT, from painful experience I can say it always felt a bit like shouting into the abyss.

Previously, however, there was no clear link between sustainability and commercial imperative.

With the US last month re-joining the Paris Agreement and new rules pressuring UK end users to gravitate towards more sustainable and socially responsible suppliers, it's now a topic we all must care about not only as human beings but as business people.

From the conversations I've had so far, our Tech Impact Campaign feels like it is part of a wider ‘moment' within the UK IT channel. As this chat I had with 'Support the Goals' founder Colin Curtis underlines, action is snowballing.

While the channel may have been behind the curve initially, it is now a board-level issue for all the big players.

Find out how your peers and suppliers are using sustainability as a competitive advantage by visiting our Tech Impact hub.

2) Innovation is all around us

As Jigsaw24's Roger Whittle put it here, if the global response to climate change was a book, we'd be on the first paragraph of the first page.

It may be early days, but it's also clear that innovation is occurring across all tiers of the channel.

Resellers, IT services providers, distributors and channel services providers are working towards first measuring, and then cutting their carbon footprints. Others are signing up to support the UN's 17 sustainable development goals or are working towards achieving the Holy Grail of B Corps status (of which there are fewer than 4,000 worldwide).

I've spoken to a firm that has developed a carbon offset tool that shows how much Co2 firms are saving in the event their IT kit is reused, and tech providers that are using IoT and cloud to help their own customers reduce their carbon footprints. One has even introduced the concept of 'decarbonisation level agreements'.

Let's not kid ourselves that the tech industry isn't a leading global carbon emitter and polluter.

But even since we launched our campaign the big vendors have continued to make strides, with HP aiming to shape sustainable behaviour throughout the channel with its Amplify Impact programme and Google ‘fessing up to how clean (or dirty) each of its cloud datacentre regions really are.

Innovation is all around us, and we will continue to provide updates of this throughout the year. Let us know what you are doing, or enter our award here.

3) Stay positive

There are some genuinely hair-raising figures out there, and limiting global warming to the two degrees Celsius laid out in the Paris Agreement is a daunting task.

The IT industry is among the culprits.

But criticising inaction won't be enough on its own.

As some of the people I have spoken to over the last four weeks have emphasised, innovation and best practice must be highlighted and rewarded if we are to make headway.

And here the IT industry differs from most others.

Like all industries, the tech sector must become more sustainable.

Where it departs from most others is that it will also play a role in helping other industries become more sustainable over the next decade, and beyond.

Find out more about our Sustainability Campaign and Awards here, and join the conversation.