Posted by Dan on October 18th, 2006
IT firm Logicalis is to work with environmental charity, the Global Action Plan. Is it all PR or has anyone out there been on one of the courses?
“Through Global Action Plan, Logicalis will offer independent environmental training programs to existing clients through its CIO engagement programme, and will be the first Systems Integrator in the UK to offer the subsidised environmental training as part of new business proposals and contract negotiations.
The training will be based on the Global Action Plan Environmental Champions Programme. The Programme is designed to enable employees to measure their own and their organisation’s environmental impact. In particular, the Programme focuses on minimising consumption of resources and raw materials and reducing harmful emissions from transport and office energy consumption, of which IT plays a growing part.
Companies who choose to adopt the Environmental Champions Programme on an on-going basis will then be helped to set their own improvement targets through a planned process of change. This will be monitored and encouraged over a twelve month period.
Posted by Dan on October 2nd, 2006
Sun - the computer company - sent me some interesting stats today.
Get this…
Green Computing Stats
- According to Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst, Robert Frances Group, a city of 40,000 people could be powered with the amount of electricity needed to run a single, large data center, and up to 40 percent of the operating cost of the building that houses the data center could be power- and cooling-related expenses. (From “The Greening of the CIO” CIO Insights, July 2006)
- Big companies spend 15% to 20% of their data center’s operating budget on power and cooling, says IDC analyst John Humphreys. For heavy tech users, that can run into millions of dollars a year.
- By 2009, technology operations in the U.S. will spend twice as much for power and cooling as they did to buy the server hardware in their data centers, according to IDC.
- Data center power usage will be the No. 1 infrastructure concern facing IT executives over the next 3 years, according to Robert Frances Group (as stated in Network World, 8/3/06).
- Total energy used by PCs in the UK in a year is 3.7 GW/h, or about 1% of total power usage. Generating this much power releases 1.6m tonnes of CO2 over a year, which would require 1.6m hectares of trees to balance – which is 10% more than the whole tree stock of the UK…
- The UK produces over 1 million tonnes of electrical and electronic waste every year – or about enough to completely fill the new Wembley stadium.
- Electronic and electrical equipment makes up on average 4% of European municipal waste, and is growing three times faster than any other municipal waste stream.
- About 23,000 tonnes of e-waste was illegally shipped to non-OECD countries in the Far East, the Indian sub-continent, West Africa and China last year.
- Last year we threw away 15m mobile phones, only 15% of which were recycled. The Cadmium in each phone has the potential to pollute 600,000 litres of water, so last year’s 12.75m could pollute 32 x the volume of Lake Windermere.
- Two million working Pentium PCs will end up in landfill sites in the UK this year.
