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This autumn, PC World will launch its first"green" PC, and surely herald a wave
of such products to hit both home and business. Is this the signal
that it is time to clear out the techno-junk and invest in a new
generation of ecologically sound hardware?
Even if there is a lot of "green washing" of products that would
have come out anyway, it would seem that the environmental benefits
are clear cut. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than
that: most of the green promises on offer centre on energy usage,
and this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to IT's
ecological impact.
"The problem with looking at power consumption alone between PCs
and other products is that the vast majority of the environmental
cost occurs before you even switch on the PC - it is the complete
opposite of a fridge or a washing machine," says Tony Roberts,
managing director of
charity Computer Aid.
He cites a UN University report from 2004 that found a PC
required 10 times its weight in raw materials at the manufacturing
stage.
"If we look only at power savings we can only possibly be
looking at 25% of the problem. It is the same with screens:
manufacturers are saying you need to switch to flat screens to make
an environmental saving, but the logical thing to do is to use
cathode ray tubes to the end of their productive life," says
Roberts.
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. Although the
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive
means that they no longer end up as landfill, it is still a waste
of resources.
"Some of the original equipment manufacturers who are now
running these take-back schemes are actually stripping down
perfectly good Pentium 4 machines and recycling them as if that
were a good thing for the environment.
"They 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," says Roberts.
Some PCs do not even make it as far as the recycling plant.
"About 20% of computers end up sitting under desks or in back
rooms. People are loath to throw them away because they remember
how much they cost. It is an asset that is just depreciating, but
which could have enormous power to save lives in a hospital or to
create wealth and jobs," says Roberts.
Reuse projects such as Computer Aid are one solution to the
problem of redundant PCs. But there are more fundamental issues
with the whole model of computing that has grown up around the
never ending bounty of Moore's Law and the runaway success of the
workhouse PC.
"We are so set in the mindset of the PC that we built a billion
machines which were primarily designed to be disconnected," says
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, executive director of Ndiyo, which aims to
develop sustainable networks for the developing world.
"Actually, all the interesting things you can do with them come
when you connect them to the network," he says.
Stafford-Fraser says that 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. When PCs were primarily office productivity
machines, this was not an issue, but as communication devices they
can now play a vital role in transforming the economies of
countries with poor transport infrastructure. Mobile phones are
already being effectively employed in this capacity.
The problem with PCs is not just their expense, but their
ongoing need for power and maintenance. One device that offers a
way to reduce this is the
Nivo
from Ndiyo - a device designed as the "thinnest of thin
clients", allowing a small network to be set up using just a PC and
a handful of screens and keyboards.
Rather than being a cut-down workstation, the Nivo only exists
to transfer keystrokes and pixels to and from a central PC,
drastically reducing power and maintenance.
"Being green was not originally our motivation. Low power
consumption is useful in itself in situations where you want to run
off a generator or solar power the cost of solar power, for
example, is pretty much proportional to the amount of watts you
want to generate.
"To run an internet cafe, for instance, on solar power, would
cost thousands of pounds more than on a conventional supply," says
Stafford-Fraser.
The challenge for Ndiyo is that the device needs to be
mass-produced to become cheap enough, and there is not yet a robust
enough distribution channel to connect it to its target end-users.
But Stafford-Fraser hopes that, like the wind-up radio before it,
the Nivo chip will eventually justify itself in a Western consumer
concept, being automatically built into monitors.
"Eventually this will be the way we do it in the Western world
by choice. You have light bulbs all round the house where you want
light - so you have wires, a fuse box and somewhere else a
generator. But everywhere we want computing we have a computer
generating a lot of light and noise," he says.
Thin client computing tends to provoke a lot of harrumphing from
IT professionals, but the big IT companies are reviving thin
clients and terminal emulation in a back-to-basics move which has
seen IBM revive the mainframe as part of its Project Big Green,
consolidating 3,900 assorted servers onto just 30 z9s.
Meanwhile Hewlett-Packard's purchase of virtualisation
specialist
Neoware is an explicit attempt to gain leadership in the
thin-client arena.
To its credit, however, Hewlett-Packard is not so much pushing
individual products as green, as it is looking at the total impact
that it has as a company, looking at areas such as packing and
shipping, as well as its products.
"You need an overall programme driven from the top," says Ian
Brooks, Hewlett-Packard's industry marketing manager for the
UK.
"You can improve the cooling in the datacentre, you can look at
thin clients or energy efficient PCs on the desktop, but then you
need to look at how to reduce commuting, by working from home or
using laptops with mobile data cards.
"Then you can think about printing and imaging. At
Hewlett-Packard we have moved to a central print function. There
are no desktop printers - it is centrally managed and run - and
then you can enforce things like double-sided printing," he
says.
For Brooks, the "green IT" movement represents an opportunity
for the CIO to support their organisation's wider green agenda by
regaining control of company IT purchasing.
"If you look at the way people used to buy things, typically
every department had its own little piece of IT.
"Even when you have centralised IT functions it is driven by
business requirements, and the IT function will be told, we need
another one of these. Now is a great time for the CIO to step up
and say, here is something that the board is struggling with and I
have a great story to tell," says Brookes.
Centralisation of IT offers companies a chance to deploy
virtualisation techniques that can radically improve the
utilisation of servers. According to Claus Egge, the program
director of European storage systems research at research company
IDC, virtualisation is such a "no-brainer" that IDC's researchers
are already scaling back their estimates for server shipments for
next year.
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," says Egge.
"That is a cycle which is coming to an end, as it is becoming
more difficult to cram more stuff in the same footprint. There is
so much heat in a confined space that people are encouraged not to
populate the server completely, so physical space has become an
issue.
"Also IT departments are finding that they cannot put more power
into IT sites - the power company will not play ball," says
Egge.
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, according to Chris Gabriel,
head of solutions marketing at integration IT provider
Logicalis.
"I always compare IT to the supply chain, because it delivers
stuff to the business. If I was a parcel firm I would not buy an
articulated lorry if I needed a transit just on the off-chance I
might need it," he says.
The key is to not just invest in green products, but to be more
efficient. "I can go into Curry's and buy the most efficient fridge
in the world, but if I stick one bottle of milk in it, it is not
efficient. So do not tell me how efficient your product is, tell me
how to make it efficient," says Gabriel.
To this end, Logicalis has teamed up with charity Global Action
Plan, sponsoring the Environmental IT Leadership Team to bring
together end-users to debate the issues.
In the meantime, Gabriel sees the current wave of green IT as
essentially benign. "With pretty much everything we have found that
has been "green", the greenness is a by-product of the real reason
you would buy it.
"But so what if every product now has a tinge of green - the
question is: why would you not want to do these things?" he
says.