Carbon Footprint

Greening your business has short-term effects that will save you money, let employees breathe better, and maybe even help land you a few more customers. These tips, sites, and kits can help your business go green for 2012.

Mitsui, a massive Japanese conglomerate, will invest US$12 million in an ambitious smart grid project that is being constructed in New Mexico.

The controversial Carbon Tax has been passed by the Senate, making the legislation a fact of life for most Australian IT businesses.

The parent of Apple supplier Foxconn has broken ground on a new R&D (research and development) facility in Taiwan to produce what could be robots that will be used in the company's manufacturing facilities.

Since January, David Filas, a data center engineer at Trinity Health, has been running decommissioned servers, networking gear and storage systems in a simple generator shed on the grounds of the healthcare provider's headquarters in Novi, Mich.

While most of the conversation at ARN’s Sustainable IT roundtable focused on energy efficiency, a critical issue that can’t be forgotten is asset disposal. E-waste is a massive problem around the world and one that’s not easy to contain, Symantec’s Jose Iglesias said.

So how can the channel demonstrate environmental savings to their customers and drive interest in sustainable solutions? ComputerCorp’s Michael van Zoggel said integrators can only do what they can do and what they can measure and justify.

It’s one thing to talk about greening your own infrastructure by better utilising or buying more energy efficient assets, but what happens when those computing resources are being delivered by a third-party provider? Is outsourcing in fact, a way to minimise your carbon impact?

A collection of images and industry expert comments from ARN's sustainable IT roundtable.

The Gillard Government’s carbon tax has provoked varied and, in some cases, extreme reactions but the message from the channel is simple - bring it on.

It was 2006, and Tom Noonan had it all. Internet Security Systems (ISS), the company he co-founded and led as CEO, was pulling in $US400 million in annual revenue and on the verge of being acquired by IBM for a whopping $US1.3 billion.

IT buys the technology; facilities buys the energy. That's the way it's always been in corporate America. But that may be changing.

Could saving the Earth – and your company's bottom line – be as simple as using fresh air to cool the datacentre?

The potential for wind power in the upper Midwest United States has led some to dub the region the "Saudi Arabia of wind." But tapping that potential isn't easy. In particular, the difficulty of integrating wind power into utility companies' transmission grids is hampering adoption.

Once upon a time, the idea of using expensive, environmentally-friendly IT was expected to flop in the harsh world of business. But fast-forward to 2009 and green technology has leapt off the drawing boards into the realm of profitability.

Big companies carry big responsibilities in leading the green push in IT. And that responsibility is something IBM takes very seriously.

With most Americans switching their mobile handsets once every 18 months, the need to find safe ways to dispose of old mobile phones has only grown. ReCellular, a self-described "electronics-sustainability" firm based in the US, has spent the past two decades working with the US-based Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) to become a major recycler and reseller of mobile handsets and accessories. Every day, ReCellular processes thousands of unwanted handsets and either fixes them for resale or sends them off to be melted down and recycled. ReCellular Vice President Mike Newman spoke with Brad Reed about how his company is helping to reduce e-waste, as well as how enterprises can benefit from donating their mobile devices for reuse and recycling.

What was your first IT job?

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

After months of speculation, the Gershon review into the Federal Government’s ICT procurement strategy hit the streets last week.

The past year has seen more column inches dedicated to the concept of green IT than just about any other topic you could name in this industry.

While I applaud any company's attempt to be environmentally responsible and implement "green" projects, I remain skeptical of long-term commitments to green initiatives that don't decrease costs, fatten the bottom line, or polish the organization's image.

The state of today's economy has triggered many economists, job experts and hiring managers to warn of layoffs and hiring contractions, and tech pros themselves have become skeptical about job security and future opportunities. Despite these concerns, the outlook for US employment, particularly in the tech sector, is not as dismal as some fortunetellers would lead us to believe.

Organisations are investing in green computers -- that is, machines that are energy efficient and built in an environmentally responsible manner -- at ever-increasing rates. Sometimes they pay a small premium to do this. Is it worth it? They seem to think so.