Green Computing

From Lauraibm

Current revision as of 11:22, 15 November 2007

In the Press

• Strategic Steps Down the Green IT Path (25-Oct-07)
• Hazardous Substances Reduced but not Eliminated from Laptops (23-Oct-07)
• Everything's Gone Green... (Oct-07)
• 11 Easy Ways to Turn Your PC Green (12-Oct-07)
• Going Green Tops Gartner's 2008 Trends List (11-Oct-07)
• Report Urges Action for Industry to Reduce Climate Change Impact (4-Oct-07)
• Refurbished Computers are Turning Green (4-Oct-07)
• 5 Signs The Computer Industry Is Finally Going Green
• Green IT Strategies Stifled by Interia (28-Sep-07)
• Green Ethernet Moves Closer as Regulations Loom (27-Sep-07)
• Can you Afford to miss out on the Benefits of Going Green? (26-Sep-07)
• Going Green Will Cut Costs (20-Sep-07)
• Finding the Economic Green in Green Computing (18-Sep-07)
• The Green Reality (18-Sep-07)
• Green IT: Clever Marketing or the Real Thing? (17-Sep-07)
• Virtualisation - a CIO's Best Friend? (14-Sep-07)
• Lenovo, PC makers jostle for top spot in green rankings (12-Sep-07)
• Verdiem Transforms Green Technology with Three Key Breakthroughs (6-Sep-07)
• Green Computing (24-Aug-06)
• The greening of IT: Why less is more (13-Aug-07)

Summaries

Full article: Lenovo, PC makers jostle for top spot in green rankings (12-Sep-07)

Last year when Greenpeace ranked the Chinese-American PC maker dead last for green credentials out of 14 global consumer electronics brands. Within a year Lenovo had soared to the top of Greenpeace's quarterly chart and has remained near the top since.

"We've made great strides on the efficiency of refrigerators and washers but we've also seen this huge proliferation of smaller electronics," said a consumer electronics expert for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy in Washington.

Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint, welcomes the focus on environment but is sceptical of its short-term impact on brand image. Making green products more affordable is a tough manufacturing challenge, but a necessary one given consumers' reluctance to pay more to be green. "You don't want a tax to be a good citizen," he said.

Full article: The greening of IT: Why less is more (13-Aug-07)

Vendors with newly discovered green credentials will often say: 'If you buy our new servers, in three years the energy savings from reducing cooling will provide payback' and so on. But do these account for the full environmental impact cost in the ROI calculation?

There is also a danger that green IT simply equates to reducing carbon dioxide emissions in order to slow climate change. Our fragile ecology is under much more of a threat than that. Green technology must also mean a responsibility towards the extraction and dumping of hazardous chemicals, destroying natural habitats to make way for acre after acre of bio-fuel crops and preventing civil wars in under-developed economies where essential raw minerals for batteries and processors can be found.

There is much we can do as individuals: e.g. lengthen upgrade cycles, and that includes software as this is frequently used as justification for upgrading hardware. A green PC isn't green when it's left switched on, when it's upgraded every 18 months and when it finds its way into a landfill, even if it now contains less toxic chemicals.