Greenwashing

From Lauraibm

In the Press

• Green IT - do companies really care? (27-Sep-07)
• Is the IT Industry Talking alot of Hot Air about Green Issues?
• Is Green IT an Illusion? (12-Sep-07)
• Today's “Green T” may not be as Healthy as we Think (27-Aug-07)
• Survey vindicates outsourcers' green press release bombardment (17-Aug-07)
• How to counter greenwash: measure what matters—and make it visible (24-Jul-07)

Summaries

Full article: Is Green IT an Illusion? (12-Sep-07)

While the developed world sees PCs more or less as consumables, for the rest of the world a PC costs half a year's salary.

Computer Aid ships between 2,000 and 3,000 PCs a month to the developing world, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the estimated three million computers that are decommissioned each year in the UK alone.

"Some vendors are not targeting reuse because there is no money in it and it does not suit their interest to have a large refurbished market. When we refurbish machines and send them overseas they enjoy on average another 6,000 user hours," said the managing director of Computer Aid.

The problem is that the IT industry is already sitting on a mountain of inefficiency, largely created by its own technological success.

"The improvements in price-performance you would get in one year were so great, the storage improvement alone was so attractive in itself, that people did not exploit stuff, it was easier to be wasteful," said an IDC director.

With space and power at a premium, the hope is that businesses will begin to look at IT in the same way that they have looked at areas such as supply chain management.

Full article: Survey vindicates outsourcers' green press release bombardment (17-Aug-07)

According to The Black Book of Outsourcing, 21% of clients already include green requirements in their vendor contracts, while over 94% intend to add such clauses in their contract renegotiations.

The firms most frantically improving their green appeal are likely to be the Indian and Chinese ones who have traditionally 'flogged cheaper, dirtier services'.

How to counter greenwash: measure what matters—and make it visible (24-Jul-07)

The UK government are taking steps to discourage greenwashing, that is, the spending of more money or time on advertising one's being green than on actually being green. Defra have announced that they will work with BSI British Standards to co-sponsor the development of a publicly available specification. This will be a standard method for measuring the greenhouse gas emissions in products and services; the intention is that this is the first step in moving towards an internationally agreed standard for measuring emissions.