Government launches major push for standards in Green ICT procurement
- 05 August, 2010 11:48
- Comments 1
The Federal Government has launched its ICT sustainability plan for 2010-2015. The document aims to help agencies bring their ICT systems into line with the Government’s overall sustainability strategy.
According to the document, the Federal Government manages 350,000 PCs and laptops, 14,000 servers, 37,500 imaging devices as well as a whole suite of consumables.
“This volume of activity raises significant environmental management concerns over the life cycle of products, mainly relating to energy use, carbon emissions, e-waste and hazardous materials, packaging and the sustainable use of precious and scarce metals,” it said.
The number of printers is set to dramatically change with Government agencies changing their desktop computer to printer ratio from 8:1 to 20:1 by July 2015. The number of desktop devices per person will move from 1.6:1 to 1.2:1 by the same deadline.
The plan provides a series of guidelines for agencies, which includes complying with ISO 14024 or 14021 standards at EPEAT Silver levels as a minimum. ICT equipment will need to be ENERGY STAR compliant and devices must have resource recovery processes in place.
Only copy paper that is at least 50 per cent recycled will be allowed by July 2011 in any Government office and suppliers will need to align their environmental management systems to ISO 14001 standards.
An ICT energy consumption target will also be adopted on top of the whole-of-government ICT procurement strategy currently pursued by the Federal Government. Desktop energy use per user will drop from 630kWh to 250kWh. Data centre and server room Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) will change from 2.5 to 1.9 by July 2015.
“Australian Government ICT operations can expect to improve energy performance by up to 20 per cent pm current consumption levels by July 2015 die to improvements to desktop and data centre energy efficiencies,” it said. “This equates to around 325,000 tonnes of carbon emissions mitigated over the five-year term.”
The document is set to place a new impetus on using standards in Green IT procurement. Suppliers and resellers will need to emphasise the environmental benefits and energy efficiency of their products and consumables.
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Comments
Fred Greenberg
1
Good that they're doing this but that only covers purchasing new equipment which in itself is not green. What are they doing to use energy more efficiently on their devices today?