Green initiatives have withered, but IT execs who think green can still make a difference.
Remember when “green computing” was all the rage? Companies competed for green awards, virtualized their data centers, set up e-waste committees, launched double-sided printing initiatives and activated power management features on PCs.
Meanwhile, equipment manufacturers strove for Energy Star compliance, hawked their efficiency statistics and followed guidelines issued by the EPA, Green Electronics Council and IEEE to position themselves as environmentally friendly.
Even the consultancies got involved, with the likes of Gartner, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Forrester Research, Inc. encouraging CIOs and IT organizations to become involved in and even lead their companies’ sustainability programs.
Today, while companies continue to seek IT efficiencies, the chest-thumping has died down to a murmur, and the overall concept of green IT has gotten a little brown around the edges. “It’s forgotten, but not gone,” says Chris Mines, an analyst at Forrester.
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The reasons for the decline in interest, Mines says, are multi-faceted. One is economic. “Everyone cares [about energy efficiency] when oil is $150 a barrel, and no one cares when it’s $50 a barrel,” he says. Another is political. A few years ago, he says, both Republicans and Democrats supported cap and trade, but today, the political climate has become more negative about efforts to limit carbon emissions. “Even though the evidence of climate change is attracting even more alarm and attention than five or six years ago, the political mechanisms are frozen in terms of putting regulations in place that would force further action on the part of corporations,” Mines says.
As a result, measuring and reporting on carbon emissions has become a “nice-to-have” as opposed to a “must-have.” Even in countries like Scandinavia or Australia where regulations have been passed, Mines says, the laws have been watered down or not enforced.
Chris Mines, an analyst at Forrester
Green IT as an agenda item never reached priority status for CIOs either, Mines says. In fact, most CIOs will expend any amount of energy if it means meeting business expectations of uptime, response time and speed of app development and deployment. “These are the metrics that matter for them, as they drive their incentives, bonuses, job retention and the like,” Mines says.
Even CompTIA retired its Green IT certification on Dec. 31, 2013, explaining that since it was introduced in 2010, “green IT has become embedded in the way companies generally do business,” according to a press release issued by the group. Others beg to differ, including Graeme Philipson, editor of The Green IT Review, who said in a blog post that his own research and observations revealed that “most organizations are struggling with or ignoring” green IT.
On the positive side, Mines says, a key selling point for hardware manufacturers continues to be improving their machines’ energy efficiency potential, albeit with less fanfare than five years ago. This is in part because suppliers recognize that efficiency benchmarks provide little in the way of competitive differentiation, he says. “Users are not basing their purchasing agreements on whether Server X is more efficient than Server Y,” Mines says. “It’s well down the list of criteria, as are how it’s packaged and shipped, where the materials are sourced from, how much waste water is used in manufacturing — no one is eyeballing this carefully.”
All this said, for the IT professional who does still care about green IT, there are steps that can be taken to move the needle on energy conservation and even spark the beginning of a corporate sustainability initiative.
- Keep an eye on the bright lights
Google, Facebook, Apple – these industry bigwigs are involved with innovative energy sourcing efforts for their data centers and making measurable progress in realizing efficiencies, Mines says. Google, for instance, has invested in 15 renewable energy companies, showing interest in both wind and solar systems, and has stated a goal of operating on 100% renewable energy.
Apple has pledged that its Cupertino, Calif., campus will run on 100% renewable energy relying on natural ventilation for 75% of the year and featuring one of the largest solar arrays in the world for a corporate campus.
Meanwhile, Facebook is building a campus in Menlo Park, Calif., that will feature a tree-covered rooftop garden, blending in with the hillside and connected to the existing campus via an underground tunnel. “There have been huge steps in the progress of the tech industry being a responsible participant if not a leader in terms of recognizing and remedying their contribution to carbon pollution and resulting climate change,” Mines says.
- Team with a passionate leader
Companies that behave in environmentally responsible ways tend to be led by a CEO who is personally passionate about the environment, Mines says. “When CEOs impose their belief system on the rest of the organization, a set of data starts to develop around employee retention, employee satisfaction and employee recruiting, in addition to a lower electricity bill and water bill,” Mines says. But the key is that the results stem from the belief rather than the other way around.
- Scrutinize your suppliers
Taken as a group, hardware buyers hold more power than regulators and legislators in encouraging suppliers to adhere to environmentally friendly practices and power-saving benchmarks, Mines says, so it pays to be vocal with suppliers that these attributes matter. “Their materials, operations, design, manufacturing, packaging – any chance you have to beat up on suppliers is a worthy activity,” Mines says. “They’re always looking to check off a couple more boxes on the purchasing criteria list.”
- Get your e-cycling on
IT professionals can also launch a grassroots effort to responsibly dispose of obsolete technology. This can range from negotiating with suppliers to take back old IT equipment, such as routers, servers and disk drives, to educating employees on where they can recycle their cellphones.
- Have lunch with the CFO
Corporate sustainability reporting has become mainstream, according to KPMG, with almost three-quarters of 4,100 companies surveyed producing such reports. Now, however, there is increased interest in requiring companies to integrate their sustainability information with their financial results. That is the goal of the Global Reporting Initiative, the organization that created the most widely used framework for sustainability reporting.
So far, just 1.4% of the S&P 500 issue fully integrated financial and sustainability reports, according to the IRRC Institute, including American Electric Power, Clorox, Dow Chemical, Eaton, Ingersoll Rand, Pfizer and Southwest Airlines. However, Europe passed legislation this year requiring companies with more than 500 employees to include sustainability factors – including their environmental, social and economic impacts – in their annual financial reports.
As momentum builds toward integrated reporting, CFOs will likely become increasingly interested and integral in corporate sustainability efforts, Mines says. IT professionals who are aware of this trend can play an important role in providing the data and creating the processes to create such reports. Or at least they can be prepared for when the CFO might one day knock on their door. “Wouldn’t it be great,” Mines says, “to be able to pull out your green IT plan that’s been thought-through and is ready to put into play?”
Which all goes to show that while there are plenty of reasons for cynicism when it comes to green IT, there are just as many areas for passionate IT professionals to engage in to keep green IT alive.
Brandel is a freelance writer. She can be reached at marybrandel@verizon.net.
