Think green, think data

Gary Price critiques the transition of the green IT agenda into procurement

Price: We must have a valid way of assessing IT for greenness

Green IT has become cemented into private and public sector transformation agendas as we collectively aim to be more sustainable.

ICT is estimated to cause almost two per cent of global CO2 emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from aviation. Most is from the manufacture, distribution and power consumption of desktops, servers, mobile phones and IT for air conditioning systems.

Barriers to adoption focus around the number of disparate measures used to qualify what is green or not. Plus, many products are not even analysed for their sustainability credentials, and few IT professionals appear to know much about IT vendors' green initiatives and products.

IT buyers struggle to get hold of manufacturer information that qualifies whether a product is in line with current green transformation strategies.

Consolidated procurement mechanisms would help companies adopt new ways of working and provide buyers with the green product data they need. Public and private sector leaders must encourage buyers to hunt out product and supply chain information.

Vendors are investing heavily in green initiatives such as energy-efficient servers, PCs, datacentre power and cooling solutions, cleaner manufacturing, and device recycling programmes. But not enough incentive is being provided for manufacturers to do due diligence on the various official green labels and logos.

Most such accreditations are US based and have a non-standardised approach. Buyers don’t understand the various parameters and rarely have time to digest swathes of information to then compare products properly.

For example, Blue Angel is a lot stricter than Epeat, but a number of optional Epeat criteria are required for Blue Angel. There are further requirements in Blue Angel that are not covered by Epeat.

Also, the UK government’s Quick Wins assessment has some additions not covered by either Blue Angel or Epeat. Each measure is granular in its detail and inconsistently looks at factors such as recycled paper use, chlorine-free packaging, halogen-free cables, energy consumption and the like.

None considers the product lifecycle or the impact of the supply chain through which a product is delivered. This is becoming critical in assessing a product’s overall sustainability and application within globally responsible businesses.

We have looked at nearly 150,000 IT products from 110 manufacturers covering 22 different product categories. We could only ascertain 22 per cent using any official environmental standard measure. How does this help the buyer?

Businesses want to reduce cost at every turn, but unless the government introduces incentives to support a drive by manufacturers to conduct green due diligence on products, how far will we get?

Here lies the next great challenge. Information or data associated with up to half a million line items, product price, stock and specifications as well as green data should all be aggregated and standardised into one simple buyers tool.

Surely this is a sustainable purchasing panacea, both in terms of the sustainable manner in which it delivers accurate data electronically but also in bringing together a standardised acknowledgement of what is green or not.

Furthermore, despite the common claim that businesses see going green as cutting costs and benefiting the bottom line, only a few IT buyers appear to have written green criteria into their purchasing processes.

Web-based technology has already been born that tackles the provision of standardised green IT data. If business and government come together to seed easier manufacturer assessments of what is green IT, then truly green shoots will grow faster.

Gary Price is a business analyst at Probrand