Green IT and more (Part IV) – Changing Staff Attitudes and Taking Action
The time has come to get your hands dirty (well, green) and take action. This part is packed with ideas and inspiration for steps that you and your organisation can take towards a more sustainable future.
Carbon cutting with telepresence
A team responsible for transferring manufacturing for an HP product from Oregon to Singapore cut an estimated 44 international employee trips from the project.
Eliminating those trips using the HP Halo telepresence solution (a videoconferencing room in which remote participants are heard and seen just as if they were sitting across the conference table) prevented 145 metric tons of carbon emissions from being released into the environment.
Ten Greenspirational Links
If this series has whetted your appetite for going green in all things IT-related, here are some links to inspire you further.
Climate Futures: The economic, political, social and psychological consequences of climate change: www.forumforthefuture.org
Cradle to Cradle: Michael Braungart and William McDonough wrote an influential book called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, which sensibly suggested that manufacturing processes should, as far as possible, mirror nature’s cycles: www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Energy Star: Save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices: www.energystar.gov
EPEAT: Evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on environmental attributes: www.epeat.net
Green Grid: Follow energy efficiency developments in data centres and business computing ecosystems: www.thegreengrid.org
Green Computing: Find out more about the role of IT in the push towards environmental sustainability: www.freeformdynamics.com
Hewlett Packard: The starting point for the company’s many environmental initiatives: www.hp.com/environment
Our Common Future: A full hypertext version of The Brundtland Report, a sustainable development report published by the UN, that we talk about in Part I: www.un-documents.net/ wced-ocf.htm
The Carbon Disclosure Project: Find primary climate change data from the world’s largest corporations: www.cdproject.net
The World Wildlife Fund: IT solutions that help business and the planet (a 2.3MB report): assets.panda.org/downloads/it_user_guide_a4.pdf
This article is part of a series of articles produced by Freeform Dynamics analyst David Tebbutt, together with Martin Atherton and Tony Lock.
